So I’ve recently been interested in doing a complete switch from Windows to Ubuntu, and I’ve been playing around with WSL2 in Windows quite a bit and I have to admit I am pretty impressed with their implementation.
However, one of the reasons I’ve been drawn to Linux these days is the privacy aspect, and I’m looking to get everyone’s thoughts on whether using Linux apps in WSL improves your privacy at all, or do I need to just flat out get off windows to get any sort of privacy benefit. My plan is to eventually get off Windows completely, but I guess I’m wondering if WSL is a good middle ground.
WSL2 is good, but not usable in all scenarios. IIRC, it can’t use systemd services. It is also very slow with file I/O, which is not a problem with small datasets, but some of the git repos I work with are so big that git operations take a couple of minutes to complete in WSL2, but only take a second or so in PowerShell. If you are doing a full backup of your PC with rsync or something like that, it could take days to complete something that would take only 30 minutes or so running in a native Windows shell.
It’s the best thing windows offers, besides maybe full virtualisation. I use it daily at work, but sharing files is annoying. I’d like to just access the files of the windows system, documents dir should be the windows docs and so on. It somewhat works with symlinks, but it still sucks. Git is slow with these linked dirs too, can’t create Fifos, fileperms suck, and so on.
Thank you very much i think im going to just go with the tried and true dual boot and slowly move to debian.
Personally, I think booting into a linux distro through a USB drive might be more what you’re looking for, but for trying specific applications WSL is great.
WSL2 bricked every single one of my VMs, took me a full work day just trying to revert back to WSL1. Might not even matter now since my boot nvme might have just died from heat yesterday.
Originally had WSL1 installed, upon upgrade to WSL2 all my VMs for VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation would no longer boot even after reverting to WSL1. I had to entirely reinitialize my VMs which took days of work.
ok so far I gather that its a no lol
