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Just want to reply here with some actual critique, so that my comment doesn't just seem like an empty snipe. WSL is at is heart a VM, and as good of a job as M
by forgotmypw17 3y ago
Just want to reply here with some actual critique, so that my comment doesn't just seem like an empty snipe.
WSL is at is heart a VM, and as good of a job as Microsoft has done at bolting it on coherently and applying all the caulk they could, it still feels like.
Sometimes it just randomly partially stops working, where I have a command prompt, but cannot access the filesystem from applications. Whether or not `wsl --shutdown` will fix it is also random.
The filesystem is not accessible to Search Everything, so any files I create in WSL I have to access through a special method, either through \\wsl$\ in Explorer (which itself is awkward) or using Total Commander (I prefer it, but it doesn't have OS integration, so if I need to put a file into a file selector dialog, it's an additional step of Copy Path and paste.)
There are still issues I run into through inconsistencies between Windows path with backslashes (which in GNU-land must be escaped as \\) and Unixy paths using slashes.
The system time gets desynced more often than not, so I actually have to have `sudo hwclock -s` in my .bashrc, which itself randomly works vs. doesn't work, and when it doesn't work, nothing short of a full system reboot seems to fix it.
Sometimes http://localhost:2784/ http://localhost:2784/ randomly stops working in Windows applications while still working in e.g. Firefox that runs in WSL.
This is just a few random things off the top of my head, but there are many, many more issues I run into day-to-day. And all I'm doing is a simple web server, Git repo, and IntelliJ. I don't even run a database server, because I use SQLite for that.
It works, but it's hardly awesome.
You may ask why I don't just install GNU/Linux on this laptop. Initially, that was the plan, but I realized that so many people out there use Windows, I need to bear through this myself for a while so that I am on the same page, and so that my software can run on Windows and WSL. But coming from Mac, it certainly feels like a bit of the ol' Harrison Bergeron sashweights.
(My recycling salvage 8-year-old Mac was somehow fast enough that I could do all my work in a GNU/Linux VM and have a clean separation between my desktop and my workstation.)