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.
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.
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.
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 install stuff.
There’s also a package called gsudo which allows you to preface a PowerShell command with sudo to run it as an administrator. It will cause a UAC prompt.
<span style="color:#323232;">sudo choco update all
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WSL in Windows Terminal is not much different from opening Konsole on any regular desktop Linux distribution. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed on WSL and I think it’s great.
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.
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
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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