I’ve had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.
There’s honestly not a lot of practical uses for it when you have the option of just running a Linux Distro anyway. It’s mostly to keep people who NEED to run Linux for work in Windows as an OS. Otherwise, I’ve found no purpose for it. Neat I guess? Useful, no.
Since wsl2 supports cuda, my gaming computer can run open source deep learning models so easily it’s stupid. I’m mainly using it to rip music from youtube and split it into stems for music production using Facebook demucs. I tinkered a bit with stable diffusion models a while back too. It’s pretty sweet, especially since windows sees the linux drive as just another directory, so my DAW can just bookmark it. It’s so seamless.
Win 11 is still garbage for privacy and ownership reasons though. MS can fuck a duck, but they make some pretty baller software.
I’ll emphasize the point that this goes for any kind of machine learning model that can benefit from CUDA, which means a large amount of gaming computers already meet the prerequisites for this. Installation is trivial (but requires some knowledge), and I hope to see more ML applications for hobbyists in the near future. Image generation and locally hosted GPT models come to mind.
WSL is great for me. Not as fast as being in native Linux but if you’re stuck in windows it’s a impressively seamless tool to just have available. I use it for convenience so I don’t have to have a second machine next to me all day
For me: totally. I need to use windows for work. With WSL, I can use all the tools I need via the Debian box underneath. All I use windows for are the communication apps my colleagues use.
Apart from work: nope. Full time Linux kinda guy
From what I gather teams-for-linux still uses the web version doesn’t it? Would that not be subject to all the same problems?
I find your mileage is somewhat dependent on the rest of the system config and how you access it. I kinda hate how WSL2 is based on hyper-V because the network stack for that is a pain in my ass, but tools like NMAP just don’t work on WSL1.
I have found that using something like MobaXterm is pretty awesome. The built-in X-Server lets me run a few useful graphical tools within WSL (GIMP, Wireshark, etc) without needing to install their windows counterparts.
