I’ve had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.
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
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.
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.
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.
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Only you can say what it’s worth to you.
I have it installed on my Win 11 work laptop but never use it.
Even I stopped using it.
It’s the best if you convince your boss that you need it for work in your non admin privilege system because you can sudo inside there so you can install whatever.
I’ll parrot the others. I have a Windows PC issued by my employer. The only way to have some Linux is WSL. I use it to sync notes with server at home, python stuff, and w3m when I want to Google something without looking conspicuous in the office.
General Linux tools also help. I needed to make video half the speed - one liner ffmpeg solves it in a jiffy. On Windows I need to install some hive software.
Yeah, you guys have it so easy
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.
When I used wsl, it felt fine. There were some problems with running more GPU intensive tasks, but being able to use linux-only software while I was restricted to Windows was pretty good.
I prefer to keep windows as a VM only on wintel hardware, with Linux on the bare metal. The less Microsoft can see the better.
There’s honestly not a lot of practical uses for it when you have the option of just running a Linux Distro anyway. It’s mostly to keep people who NEED to run Linux for work in Windows as an OS. Otherwise, I’ve found no purpose for it. Neat I guess? Useful, no.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it.
WSL has replaced my use of the command prompt in Windows for anything (and I used it more than most, I think).
In my job, I develop Linux applications to support industrial automation, and WSL is capable of building and running most of what I make. It isn’t a full Linux machine, and can behave unexpectedly when trying to do things like changing certain network configurations.
So it’s great for what it’s for, really. But if you want a full VM, this isn’t really for that.
Point taken.
