I’ve had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.
I am a software developer and am forced to have Windows on my work computer. WSL allows me to have a Linux terminal that I can use directly on my files without needed a VM.
I guess that’s a bonus.
But being forced to use a terminal to do anything is kinda hard to deal with if you’re not a developer. I’m probably guessing this didn’t bother you that much.
I prefer the terminal and have tools I like to use that are CLI only.
Edit: and Linux only.
What are you trying to do on WSL? I think the whole point of WSL originally was to have a linux terminal on Windows, before they added graphics in WSL 2.
Same. Well, not forced, but using Linux would just make everything more difficult. I like being able to drop to a shell and use a Linux environment with its useful utilities to manipulate stuff on my Windows PC.
Yeah, I could use mingw, but that is a pain, and I can’t just apt install stuff.
Not the same as apt, but there’s Chocolately, which is actually a legitimate package manager for Windows.
choco install firefox
There’s also a package called gsudo which allows you to preface a PowerShell command with sudo to run it as an administrator. It will cause a UAC prompt.
sudo choco update all
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.
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.
It’s fine if all you need/want is a Linuxy shell to work with, but if you actually want a proper Linux computer, with a DE that doesn’t suck, mapable keyboard shortcuts, no spyware, working workspaces, tools that do what you want rather than what Microsoft wants for you, etc., you’re going to be miserable.
In my experience, if you need to do Linux kind of things on a Windows computer, it’s far less glitchy, buggy and laden with weird caveats and edge cases than the alternatives (like Cygwin and Git Bash).
To be fair, I’ve never used it. But I’ve been the guy people come to when shit doesn’t work. Switching from Cygwin or Git Bash to WSL frequently fixes issues.
