I use WSL daily on my desktop and laptop for work - full stack development and sysadmin/devops. Familiar CLI tools available right from my Windows desktop are a great thing.
I’m really, really happy with WSL since I can use one powerful PC for work, music recording and occasional gaming.
I use it for all of my dev stuff, and I like it. I'm mostly a windows user, a few of our devs are heavy gamers, so they appreciate having a windows machine. With WSL, we run our servers in linux, and have browsers open in windows, and running VSCode in windows.
The other benefit for us, is with the graphics work we do, and most of our users being on windows, in Chrome or Firefox, we're developing using the software our users are in, while developing in the same server environment our servers run on.
It was fidgety to get set-up the first time, but now, that we've got that sorted, it's quite nice.
It's really amazing. I don't know much about Linux, but whenever I need to use some Linux only tool(or works best on linux tool), I just use wsl. Tried using a couple of linux desktops but the user experience is just terrible compared to windows for day to day work and there aren't many softwares available.
I moved to Windows after 5 years of Mac this month. Because I knew I will be working from home, decided to build a good workstation (Thank you Ryzen ) and I Couldn't agree more WSL is very helpful for people who like windows UI and functionalities of Linux. There are few quirks but it works great.
Def going to give this a try today. With CLion now supporting WSL as a toolchain I've now found myself in a strangely productive environment where Windows + WSL is my primary environment and I barely notice the transition between the two -- apart from the sub-par terminal experience. Looking forward to this...
WSL is great if you want/need a full Linux environment. It is quite heavy and probably overkill if all you want is to use some coreutil commands from the Windows terminal.
I have to use a secure Windows laptop for work, but I admin Linux servers. WSL has been great for me, if only so that I can use a real linux command line and terminal instead of PuTTY when I SSH into boxes.
I've done most of my Linux development on WSL for the last year. It stuggles sometimes under certain types of heavy IO load, and there are ocsssional compatibility issues, but overall it's been impressively reliable and convenient.
WSL is great. I use my personal computer for gaming, but I also like using it for side projects, and dual-booting is a pain in the ass. WSL makes it super smooth to have a proper dev env. I can use gvim from Linux just fine, with a bit of configuration I can even share clipboard.
I think it still has a few rough edges,but fortunately I haven't had to deal with those. Also recently they added support for systemd which is awesome. Most packages "just work".
WSL is great so long as everything you need to do runs inside its VM. If you need to access things on the main Windows filesystem, you're basically accessing a networked file system at that point, with all that entails for perf.
I really like WSL. Some weeks ago I switched to Ubuntu again because developing is still a nightmare on Windows. But what really impressed me was how much faster it is.
I’m really, really happy with WSL since I can use one powerful PC for work, music recording and occasional gaming.
reply