I’ve had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.
I am a software developer and am forced to have Windows on my work computer. WSL allows me to have a Linux terminal that I can use directly on my files without needed a VM.
Same. Well, not forced, but using Linux would just make everything more difficult. I like being able to drop to a shell and use a Linux environment with its useful utilities to manipulate stuff on my Windows PC.
Yeah, I could use mingw, but that is a pain, and I can’t just
apt installstuff.Not the same as
apt, but there’s Chocolately, which is actually a legitimate package manager for Windows.choco install firefoxThere’s also a package called
gsudowhich allows you to preface a PowerShell command withsudoto run it as an administrator. It will cause a UAC prompt.sudo choco update all
I guess that’s a bonus.
But being forced to use a terminal to do anything is kinda hard to deal with if you’re not a developer. I’m probably guessing this didn’t bother you that much.
I prefer the terminal and have tools I like to use that are CLI only.
Edit: and Linux only.
Good to know.
What are you trying to do on WSL? I think the whole point of WSL originally was to have a linux terminal on Windows, before they added graphics in WSL 2.
I was trying to run applications on it, similar to their Windows Subsystem for Android that they released as an update to Windows 11. I have to say, the latter is significantly easier to deal with imo.
For me: totally. I need to use windows for work. With WSL, I can use all the tools I need via the Debian box underneath. All I use windows for are the communication apps my colleagues use.
Apart from work: nope. Full time Linux kinda guy
Glad to know teams isn’t just the bane of my existence on linux
Teams and outlook have both pretty good third party flatpaks.
From what I gather teams-for-linux still uses the web version doesn’t it? Would that not be subject to all the same problems?
From what I hear the only thing that doesn’t work is reaction emojis in meetings.
Might give it another go then, the problem for me is not that it doesn’t work, but that it doesn’t work reliably though
Have been using it as a PWA and half the time it forgets I gave it mic permissions or resets my audio settings/doesn’t even recognise my mic in the first place
I use flatpak edge and install teams as a pwa works like a charm.
Edge I haven’t tried yet. Have been trying to use degoogled chromium where I can but that’s a battle I might have to give up on in this case
I had been using WSL2 for about one year. The experience was terrible compared to a Linux host. (Sadly I can’t change the system on my work laptop). However, it was much better than Cygwin, msys2 and powershell - based on my experience.
If your host OS is windows and you’re interested in Linux, I think WSL2 is a good way to have a try
Best thing available on windows, still suffers from running on windows, but inside is a pretty usable Linux distro
WSL is great for me. Not as fast as being in native Linux but if you’re stuck in windows it’s a impressively seamless tool to just have available. I use it for convenience so I don’t have to have a second machine next to me all day
In my experience, if you need to do Linux kind of things on a Windows computer, it’s far less glitchy, buggy and laden with weird caveats and edge cases than the alternatives (like Cygwin and Git Bash).
To be fair, I’ve never used it. But I’ve been the guy people come to when shit doesn’t work. Switching from Cygwin or Git Bash to WSL frequently fixes issues.
Just use Linux. Its manageable to do it through windows but youre only using like 10% of Linux Power.
Been daily driving WSL Debian for about a year on my work laptop, without systemd and display server. At first, I was really only using it for application servers that just won’t run or too tedious to run on windows. But windows is just terrible for dev work that’s not part of windows eco system. So I found myself slowly moving most of my dev stuff to WSL. There are still some problems though.
Off the top of my head, first is neovim and the system clipboard. I can use clip.exe but there’s a problem with unicode characters. It’s expecting some UTF-16 encoding or something but my bash is in UTF-8. And somehow that messes up copying some unicode characters. I have to either use
iconvto convert the encoding before copying or may be change my bash encoding.Another recent problem I had is binding WSL ports to the window host’s network. WSL automatically binds the service ports to host window’s localhost with the same port number, which is pretty useful. But it only binds to localhost address. If you want it to bind to other addresses, you can’t configure it. You can to run some kind of a patch program someone wrote, that rebinds WSL ports the wildcard address. And it doesn’t work very well if the patch program’s version and your WSL’s versions are not compatible.
Another minor problem is that there’s some kind of a freeze that lasts for about a minute when I’m doing fzf in bash. It happens sporadically. I’m not entirely sure if the problem’s with Windows Terminal or WSL. It’s likely WSL. It seems to happen with other terminal emulators as well.
All in all, WSL makes having to be on windows a whole lot bearable. I’ll probably end up using only rudimentary UI apps on windows and move the rest to WSL.
I find it OK if you must use windows but it was fairly annoying to deal with and those annoyances are what got me to actually go for the whole Linux deal and I’m happy I switched.
And I’m willing to do that as well.
If you’re willing to switch, and there’s no obstacle to it, I’d say go for that.
I’ve had a pretty poor experience with it myself
Could you elaborate?
Sometimes when I install applications through the command line interface, the applications I installed don’t end up opening. I’m not sure why.
It’s fine if all you need/want is a Linuxy shell to work with, but if you actually want a proper Linux computer, with a DE that doesn’t suck, mapable keyboard shortcuts, no spyware, working workspaces, tools that do what you want rather than what Microsoft wants for you, etc., you’re going to be miserable.
If your only interest is using Linux, you should probably do just that. No need to install anything else.
Well in this case, using Linux means not using Windows, doesn’t it?
Yes, spare yourself from using wsl and try the full linux experience. 😊
Since wsl2 supports cuda, my gaming computer can run open source deep learning models so easily it’s stupid. I’m mainly using it to rip music from youtube and split it into stems for music production using Facebook demucs. I tinkered a bit with stable diffusion models a while back too. It’s pretty sweet, especially since windows sees the linux drive as just another directory, so my DAW can just bookmark it. It’s so seamless.
Win 11 is still garbage for privacy and ownership reasons though. MS can fuck a duck, but they make some pretty baller software.
That’s an interesting use case.
I’ll emphasize the point that this goes for any kind of machine learning model that can benefit from CUDA, which means a large amount of gaming computers already meet the prerequisites for this. Installation is trivial (but requires some knowledge), and I hope to see more ML applications for hobbyists in the near future. Image generation and locally hosted GPT models come to mind.
Sometimes in enterprise environments you’re not allowed to have a proper Linux and you’re forced even as dev to use that thing from ms.
Since hardly any code in the web runs on NT, the wsl is the only way getting your things done. It does what it does OK(ish) but except of that single usecase I would never use it.
I find your mileage is somewhat dependent on the rest of the system config and how you access it. I kinda hate how WSL2 is based on hyper-V because the network stack for that is a pain in my ass, but tools like NMAP just don’t work on WSL1.
I have found that using something like MobaXterm is pretty awesome. The built-in X-Server lets me run a few useful graphical tools within WSL (GIMP, Wireshark, etc) without needing to install their windows counterparts.
