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.
If I have to use Windows then WSL is fine, otherwise I’d always use Linux.
As far as privacy is concerned, if it’s running on Windows then WSL is not going to help.
I’d suggest that good middle ground would be installing Linux and running Windows in a VM.
Windows has complete access to the WSL file system, so there’s zero privacy improvement. If you’re concerned with privacy, take a look at Arch Linux or Gentoo to install only the components you want, or if you are looking for extreme privacy, check out Tails or possibly QubesOS. Those are probably not the place to start learning about Linux but you mentioned privacy. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. all have telemetry and crap built in so if you want privacy/anonymity you should look at other systems like the ones I mentioned. Have fun, good luck.
Thank you for the reply, that is also news to me about Ubuntu. Since im so used to debian based distros, I think i may just look into just using plain vanilla debian.
Even Debian has it, but at least they seem very transparent about it.
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.
Much rather dual boot or use a VM.
