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
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.
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
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.
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 iconv to 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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