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WSL2 was promised as a good working extension for a Linux dev environment on windows by my peers. Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment m

WSL2 was promised as a good working extension for a Linux dev environment on windows by my peers. Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it. More importantly, this became the very reason I switched to arch full time, and haven’t looked back since. I still hope that it becomes what it was promised to be, although I don’t see myself going back to windows any time soon.

madeofpalk 6y ago
Opposite anecdata - I got a gaming PC and i migrated all my development to it and WSL(2) has been a godsend. VS Code has a "WSL Remote" mode that works really well (where a vscode server runs in Linux and the windows GUI access it "remotely"). I even use the Windows Github app for the occasional GUI-assisted commit, and apart from being slow its fine. I've had only two problems with this set up: - Occasionally VS Code Typescript features slow down, but it fixes itself a few days later (maybe after a restart). I presume this is due to the WSL Remote, but not certain. - The occasional line endings snafu, but this is more of a tooling issue.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gavinray 6y ago
  Also opposite anecdote, I switched from Pop!_OS to Windows after getting into music production recently as a hobby (MIDI controller driver software doesn't always play well, even with WINE-devel) after over a decade on Linux. I expected to hate it, but I'm asking myself why I didn't do this sooner. It's the same sort of scenario as before -- I have Windows running the games I occasionally play, and music stuff, and I do all of my code stuff in WSL2/Ubuntu. But this way, I never have to fiddle with weird WINE patches or googling bugs, everything "just works". Asking myself why I didn't do this sooner to be honest. I had one big complaint which is that copying files from Windows to WSL2 would create ".ZoneInfo" file copies of every file, that was downloaded from the web, but they patched this recently too. With the support for Linux GUI apps that launched with Windows Insider Preview recently, I have a hard time making arguments against it now. The taste of crow is a little bitter, eh. Linux + WINE/Proton basically felt like shittier, more bug-ridden Windows + WSL2. With the one notable exception that as an OS/host, Windows 10 "feels" a bit slower in general.
  - nijaru 6y ago
    I’ve always solved this issue by keeping windows on one drive and linux on another. It does have an upfront cost, but keeping my dev work / linux environment setup has always worked well for me. Lately I’ve thought of trying WSL, but I don’t see any real benefit over my current setup
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      IMHO dedicated environments encourage mindsets specific to those environments thus make you more productive. Would not switch to not having them.
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    I've recently come across the same issue with DAWs. Settled on having multiple machines and switching the drives if I need to reuse a workstation for something else. Most of the time you can dedicate cheap systems to specific utilizations, it will save you time and effort. e.g. There is no reason for your DAW machine to also be your gaming machine as the hardware requirements are pretty different.
    - qppo 6y ago
      It seems fairly expensive to have different machines for gaming and music production/recording when the only substantial difference is relative investment into CPU and GPU cycles.
      - kalium-xyz 6y ago
        You dont need new computers for everything. Older machines are often super cheap and saving them from getting scrapped reduces ewaste.
    - iakov 6y ago
      There is no reason to have multiple computers, apart from a laptop and workstation for people who need to be able to work on the go. Not only upfront cost, but license costs, update management, hardware replacement and finally disposal and recycling are piling up. I fail to see the upside, honestly.
- gavinray 6y ago
  Oh you need to fucking disable Window's Defender though, or add exclusions for your Linux distro/WSL2 folder, because when installing "node_modules" it will attempt to do realtime scans for threat-protection which absolutely cripples the speed. https://www.cicoria.com/improving-windows-subsystem-for-linux-wsl-by-500-minutes-to-seconds/ https://www.cicoria.com/improving-windows-subsystem-for-linu... https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eok776/has_anyone_experienced_slow_performance_when/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eok7... "I noticed a significant performance difference after adding exclusions to the Windows Defender. My Rails server and NPM installs sped up dramatically (I mean like 4x faster, no joke)." Stupid.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    This is nothing specific to WSL though, Windows has always had this problem. I expect there are many Windows developers who have no idea how much time they spend waiting for their code to be virus scanned every day.
    - 0x138d5 6y ago
      Some IDEs have started warning about this performance hit. IntelliJ + Gradle for example, but I'm guessing other Jetbrains products do the same.
      - Roritharr 6y ago
        That's what made me aware of the problem. Now I need a comfortable gui for managing just those folders.
    - glandium 6y ago
      To give an idea how bad it is, building Firefox on a Threadripper 3970X on Windows takes slightly over 12 minutes if you don't disable Defender and somewhere around 7 minutes if you do.
      - samb1729 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
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- waheoo 6y ago
  I don't really know if you can call running a remote vs code setup on localhost as opposite anecdata. Isn't that just more of the same bullshit hoop jumping? Everytime I hear about how great someone's wsl setup is I roll my eyes because it inevitably involves some rediculously convoluted wrangling to the nth level for something that is relatively basic on native Linux. And these people rarely have an excuse for why they prefer windows over say fedora which has been a better than windows windows experience since windows 8. Edit, wow even this thread people are suggesting the most drastic of things, let's run an entirely separate hard drive, oh but you need to fiddle with startup scripts because it couldn't be automatic.
  - aksss 6y ago
    >> convoluted wrangling With good humor, his describes my experience with Linux distros since I first started using them. Doing just about anything seems to require some convoluted wrangling. :)
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    > Isn't that just more of the same bullshit hoop jumping? But it’s not jumping through hoops? I just either run `code .` (like I did on macOS) or select recent folder from within VS Code. It all just works fairly well, identical to ‘natively’ within Windows (except the occasional ts slowdown I mentioned before). > And these people rarely have an excuse for why they prefer windows Not that anyone needs an ‘excuse’ for their personal preference, but I would actually prefer macOS. But I got a Windows PC to use software that only runs on Windows (games) and then the whole wfh thing happened and here we are. I’m not interested in rebooting between different operating systems when I switch tasks, especially when they overlap (developing for games). Convince Bungie to port their game to macOS and I’ll buy a Mac Pro to be back home on a Mac full time :)
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      > Not that anyone needs an ‘excuse’ for their personal preference No kidding. But on this site I’ve been lectured about the “consequences” of my personal preferences (when they in no way make alternatives less viable) and told my conscious tradeoffs are actually ignorant of the things I’m trading off even after I explicitly stated them. Tech communities love to talk about choice and freedom and love to try to Jedi mind trick people out of it in the same breath.
- mmgutz 6y ago
  I also work mainly from a gaming desktop PC. WSL2 linux distros are not equal to bare metal linux distros. WSL2 Debian doesn't have systemd installed and what a fvckery it is trying to get it to work. That means sshd, docker, k3s don't work as expected on reboot. Some apps do not install properly becasue scripts expect systemd. Windows networking is PITA too just to do something simple like SSH into a WSL2 instance. I don't get why deep Windows integration is so important. It's not something I would use on a production box. I just want Hyper-V to work like VMware and VirtualBox. As you say, VSCode remote makes it all seamless anyway. I had to go back to VMware 15.5.2 (version before hyper-v layer) and disable hyper-v completely.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  code . is some dark WSL magic that turned learning to develop on Windows from an endless headache to an intermittent headache. I always ran into some weird/inscrutable issue trying to follow tutorials with Windows ports of things.
beervirus 6y ago
> Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it. Sounds like last time I tried Linux on the desktop.
Railsify 6y ago
Agreed, I can't use virtualbox and WSL2 at the same time, epic fail.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Can you expound on this? Windows doesn't let you use VirtualBox and WSL2 at the same time?
  - strombofulous 6y ago
    WSL2 uses hyper-v. You can only run either hyper-v or ESXi (VB's hypervisor) at the same time.
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      ESXi is VMware's 'bare-metal' hypervisor. I'm not sure what VirtualBox uses, but I doubt it's ESXi, unless Oracle wants lawsuits (oh, wait...nevermind; they love them.)
    - shoo_pl 6y ago
      That's not longer true. Yes, WSL2 is type-1 hypervisor (which means Linux under WSL2 and windows are both VMs of sort, managed by higher level invisible "main" OS) and initially this made running VMs inside windows impossible (since technically that would be VM inside VM). But this has been fixed for months now - originally not only it was not possible to run virtualbox (or vmware, ESXi is vmware type-1 btw, dont mistake it with free vbox) but also it was not possible to run docker either. Edit: btw. this is why it took so long for WSL2 to be released to public; they gave time to most of the VM solutions to adapt to the fact windows would be running under type-1 hypervisor.
      - Railsify 6y ago
        The virtualbox VM launches but it is too slow to be usable, kind of like a car that only goes 5 mph. So slow in fact that virtualbox shows the little turtle icon on the status bar.
gutino 6y ago
i have three different/language dev setup, in one of them, i hit a known bug with ulimit. but the two rest worked well. I guess with time it will get fixed, we have to be patient, report try/use it so we can report bugs.
yokoprime 6y ago
i've used WSL2 with a Debian install and its worked flawlessly. Only issues i've had is working with ntfs volumes from the host, e.g /mnt/c. that's really slow. otherwise wsl2 has been fine for me
mraza007 6y ago
I’m in the same boat as you. I moved to linux for similar reason and haven’t really looked back
a-dub 6y ago
between apple silicon and x86 container performance issues from emulation and wsl2 being what sounds like a pretty big regression... drum roll ...maybe 2021 is finally the year of the linux desktop...

madeofpalk 6y ago

Opposite anecdata - I got a gaming PC and i migrated all my development to it and WSL(2) has been a godsend. VS Code has a "WSL Remote" mode that works really well (where a vscode server runs in Linux and the windows GUI access it "remotely"). I even use the Windows Github app for the occasional GUI-assisted commit, and apart from being slow its fine. I've had only two problems with this set up: - Occasionally VS Code Typescript features slow down, but it fixes itself a few days later (maybe after a restart). I presume this is due to the WSL Remote, but not certain. - The occasional line endings snafu, but this is more of a tooling issue.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gavinray 6y ago
Also opposite anecdote, I switched from Pop!_OS to Windows after getting into music production recently as a hobby (MIDI controller driver software doesn't always play well, even with WINE-devel) after over a decade on Linux. I expected to hate it, but I'm asking myself why I didn't do this sooner. It's the same sort of scenario as before -- I have Windows running the games I occasionally play, and music stuff, and I do all of my code stuff in WSL2/Ubuntu. But this way, I never have to fiddle with weird WINE patches or googling bugs, everything "just works". Asking myself why I didn't do this sooner to be honest. I had one big complaint which is that copying files from Windows to WSL2 would create ".ZoneInfo" file copies of every file, that was downloaded from the web, but they patched this recently too. With the support for Linux GUI apps that launched with Windows Insider Preview recently, I have a hard time making arguments against it now. The taste of crow is a little bitter, eh. Linux + WINE/Proton basically felt like shittier, more bug-ridden Windows + WSL2. With the one notable exception that as an OS/host, Windows 10 "feels" a bit slower in general.
- nijaru 6y ago
  I’ve always solved this issue by keeping windows on one drive and linux on another. It does have an upfront cost, but keeping my dev work / linux environment setup has always worked well for me. Lately I’ve thought of trying WSL, but I don’t see any real benefit over my current setup
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    IMHO dedicated environments encourage mindsets specific to those environments thus make you more productive. Would not switch to not having them.
- kalium-xyz 6y ago
  I've recently come across the same issue with DAWs. Settled on having multiple machines and switching the drives if I need to reuse a workstation for something else. Most of the time you can dedicate cheap systems to specific utilizations, it will save you time and effort. e.g. There is no reason for your DAW machine to also be your gaming machine as the hardware requirements are pretty different.
  - qppo 6y ago
    It seems fairly expensive to have different machines for gaming and music production/recording when the only substantial difference is relative investment into CPU and GPU cycles.
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      You dont need new computers for everything. Older machines are often super cheap and saving them from getting scrapped reduces ewaste.
  - iakov 6y ago
    There is no reason to have multiple computers, apart from a laptop and workstation for people who need to be able to work on the go. Not only upfront cost, but license costs, update management, hardware replacement and finally disposal and recycling are piling up. I fail to see the upside, honestly.
gavinray 6y ago
Oh you need to fucking disable Window's Defender though, or add exclusions for your Linux distro/WSL2 folder, because when installing "node_modules" it will attempt to do realtime scans for threat-protection which absolutely cripples the speed. https://www.cicoria.com/improving-windows-subsystem-for-linux-wsl-by-500-minutes-to-seconds/ https://www.cicoria.com/improving-windows-subsystem-for-linu... https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eok776/has_anyone_experienced_slow_performance_when/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eok7... "I noticed a significant performance difference after adding exclusions to the Windows Defender. My Rails server and NPM installs sped up dramatically (I mean like 4x faster, no joke)." Stupid.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  This is nothing specific to WSL though, Windows has always had this problem. I expect there are many Windows developers who have no idea how much time they spend waiting for their code to be virus scanned every day.
  - 0x138d5 6y ago
    Some IDEs have started warning about this performance hit. IntelliJ + Gradle for example, but I'm guessing other Jetbrains products do the same.
    - Roritharr 6y ago
      That's what made me aware of the problem. Now I need a comfortable gui for managing just those folders.
  - glandium 6y ago
    To give an idea how bad it is, building Firefox on a Threadripper 3970X on Windows takes slightly over 12 minutes if you don't disable Defender and somewhere around 7 minutes if you do.
    - samb1729 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
waheoo 6y ago
I don't really know if you can call running a remote vs code setup on localhost as opposite anecdata. Isn't that just more of the same bullshit hoop jumping? Everytime I hear about how great someone's wsl setup is I roll my eyes because it inevitably involves some rediculously convoluted wrangling to the nth level for something that is relatively basic on native Linux. And these people rarely have an excuse for why they prefer windows over say fedora which has been a better than windows windows experience since windows 8. Edit, wow even this thread people are suggesting the most drastic of things, let's run an entirely separate hard drive, oh but you need to fiddle with startup scripts because it couldn't be automatic.
- aksss 6y ago
  >> convoluted wrangling With good humor, his describes my experience with Linux distros since I first started using them. Doing just about anything seems to require some convoluted wrangling. :)
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > Isn't that just more of the same bullshit hoop jumping? But it’s not jumping through hoops? I just either run `code .` (like I did on macOS) or select recent folder from within VS Code. It all just works fairly well, identical to ‘natively’ within Windows (except the occasional ts slowdown I mentioned before). > And these people rarely have an excuse for why they prefer windows Not that anyone needs an ‘excuse’ for their personal preference, but I would actually prefer macOS. But I got a Windows PC to use software that only runs on Windows (games) and then the whole wfh thing happened and here we are. I’m not interested in rebooting between different operating systems when I switch tasks, especially when they overlap (developing for games). Convince Bungie to port their game to macOS and I’ll buy a Mac Pro to be back home on a Mac full time :)
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    > Not that anyone needs an ‘excuse’ for their personal preference No kidding. But on this site I’ve been lectured about the “consequences” of my personal preferences (when they in no way make alternatives less viable) and told my conscious tradeoffs are actually ignorant of the things I’m trading off even after I explicitly stated them. Tech communities love to talk about choice and freedom and love to try to Jedi mind trick people out of it in the same breath.
mmgutz 6y ago
I also work mainly from a gaming desktop PC. WSL2 linux distros are not equal to bare metal linux distros. WSL2 Debian doesn't have systemd installed and what a fvckery it is trying to get it to work. That means sshd, docker, k3s don't work as expected on reboot. Some apps do not install properly becasue scripts expect systemd. Windows networking is PITA too just to do something simple like SSH into a WSL2 instance. I don't get why deep Windows integration is so important. It's not something I would use on a production box. I just want Hyper-V to work like VMware and VirtualBox. As you say, VSCode remote makes it all seamless anyway. I had to go back to VMware 15.5.2 (version before hyper-v layer) and disable hyper-v completely.
mkr-hn 6y ago
code . is some dark WSL magic that turned learning to develop on Windows from an endless headache to an intermittent headache. I always ran into some weird/inscrutable issue trying to follow tutorials with Windows ports of things.

beervirus 6y ago

> Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it. Sounds like last time I tried Linux on the desktop.

Railsify 6y ago

Agreed, I can't use virtualbox and WSL2 at the same time, epic fail.

heavyset_go 6y ago
Can you expound on this? Windows doesn't let you use VirtualBox and WSL2 at the same time?
- strombofulous 6y ago
  WSL2 uses hyper-v. You can only run either hyper-v or ESXi (VB's hypervisor) at the same time.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    ESXi is VMware's 'bare-metal' hypervisor. I'm not sure what VirtualBox uses, but I doubt it's ESXi, unless Oracle wants lawsuits (oh, wait...nevermind; they love them.)
  - shoo_pl 6y ago
    That's not longer true. Yes, WSL2 is type-1 hypervisor (which means Linux under WSL2 and windows are both VMs of sort, managed by higher level invisible "main" OS) and initially this made running VMs inside windows impossible (since technically that would be VM inside VM). But this has been fixed for months now - originally not only it was not possible to run virtualbox (or vmware, ESXi is vmware type-1 btw, dont mistake it with free vbox) but also it was not possible to run docker either. Edit: btw. this is why it took so long for WSL2 to be released to public; they gave time to most of the VM solutions to adapt to the fact windows would be running under type-1 hypervisor.
    - Railsify 6y ago
      The virtualbox VM launches but it is too slow to be usable, kind of like a car that only goes 5 mph. So slow in fact that virtualbox shows the little turtle icon on the status bar.

gutino 6y ago

i have three different/language dev setup, in one of them, i hit a known bug with ulimit. but the two rest worked well. I guess with time it will get fixed, we have to be patient, report try/use it so we can report bugs.

yokoprime 6y ago

i've used WSL2 with a Debian install and its worked flawlessly. Only issues i've had is working with ntfs volumes from the host, e.g /mnt/c. that's really slow. otherwise wsl2 has been fine for me

mraza007 6y ago

I’m in the same boat as you. I moved to linux for similar reason and haven’t really looked back

a-dub 6y ago

between apple silicon and x86 container performance issues from emulation and wsl2 being what sounds like a pretty big regression... drum roll ...maybe 2021 is finally the year of the linux desktop...