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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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