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by jclay 2597 days ago
I still appreciate the WSL approach quite a bit more. I use them as “containers” (though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers) If I need to test that my C++ project will compile and run on Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch, it is pretty trivial to do that using WSL.

I also avoid the issue of the differences between macOS unix tools like grep, where there are certain flags that differ from those on linux as I recall. This is of course resolved with using a port, but they’re still community maintained ports and under no guarantee to work the same on macOS and Linux.

2 comments

> though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers

I think this needs a 'yet', since supposedly it'll be changing with WSL 2 later this year.

That seems quite risky. There are important differences between WSL and the real Linux kernel, and running on either is not adequate testing for the other.