WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

“properly integrating USB devices, not whatever this usbipd crap is, or a window manager that doesn't inexplicably die and require a full machine restart”

“It's been blocked at companies I have worked at. In one case it briefly worked but thereafter WSL lost network access.”

“This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring, this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.”

“Now there is virtio support, finally no need to depend on external CLI tools for what should have been in the box”

“run separate wsl distros (VMs) eg Debian-node , debian-Claude by importing root images”

“you can quickly import distro images into named WSL VMs (distros) to keep things separated”

“just need stable Linux compatible environment related to sysadmin and development tasks - indeed it rocks”

“You have some stuff in WSL that completely are broken once you call a windows native app.”

“running it in a container or WSL2 allows you to severly limit the blast radius”

“I've mostly enjoyed having WSL to leverage Linux dev tools, but it seems like it's still adding overhead”

“WSL2 which is very natively integrated with windows to where it supports CUDA with native like performance”

“WSL2 is honestly the only thing keeping me sane having to work with a Windows 11 desktop environment at work.”

“The mount is fine and speedy enough, but the underlying reads/writes turn into native NTFS reads/writes through Windows.”

“For normal usage the performance is completely acceptable but for development tasks it matters.”

“They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse.”

“If it is as good of an improvement as the first major update, it will be hard to tell from native.”

“Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps”

“The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.”

“WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, Per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, DirectX 12”

“It's not ideal compared to native on Linux or even mac but still works quite well for many use cases.”

“I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows.”

“especially as I already have WSL if I do need Linux, as WSL has GPU passthrough.”

“W11+WSL2 is just a straight up better experience than Linux native on my laptop.”

“Windows 7 with security packs + WSL would have been about as good as it gets on Microsoft's side.”

“It's painless if you just set it up to automatically forward the device on startup.”

“sometimes WSL crashes and there's literally no way to recover except to restart the whole machine”

“Microsoft crapped the bed and ruined performance for how disk access works between folders shared between Windows and Linux”

“Once you get stable drivers; I find Windows 11,with wsl as my shell, to be quite nice.”

“WSL is a far better developer environment in Windows even for dotnet based development.”

“WSL2 is available to get ones toes wet as well, without needing to go through the install process of any Linux flavor”

“Just role out a new WSL env for each claude I want yoloing and away it goes.”

“I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils”

“It is like arguing Windows is a quite-usable UNIX platform thanks to WSL 2.0.”

“the only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL”

“I used it for a little bit (got Windows laptop, thought maybe I'll switch but no), and just hated that split brain workspace.”

“wsl2 has some quirks if you're using a company VPN but overall pretty solid”

“getting a "native" Linux terminal through Windows was enough for me for most things”

“wsl and hyperv work fine just can't really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems”

“WSL/Docker became a natural fit as it was "closer to production" for the development workflow.”

“All our devs who use Windows for dotnet dev now use WSL2 as it matches production.”