[bjoernbu]

Mostly doing several kinds of NLP: My actual setup is a Windows Laptop to SSH into Linux machines w/ tmux session. However, I really appreciate WSL for working offline, etc.

My main reason: It is the most convenient way to have Unix tools (grep/sort/cut/sed/less/...) and bash available. Cygwin always was a pain, MinGW / GitBash felt much better, but ultimately WSL just feels best.

These tools are incredibly valuable to my workflow. Sure, stuff like pandas can be nice for small datasets, and some data sits in some DB/Kafka/distributed system. But there have been countless cases where unix tools allowed me to take xxGB zpfiles of text and do basic examination or even build baseline models within a few hours.

Sure, there always are alternatives to use these tools and there are many equivalents. But I would always prefer WSL + conda for Linux to a typical "Windows Conda" installation with that weird GUI and the need to install so many different applications to even just look into the first or last few lines of a huge textfile.

EDIT: That said, of course I can/could always just run a juypter notebook under windows using windows cuda + GPU and share files with a WSL bash where I do my modifications. But again, everything within the same systems just feels better (ipython shell magic, no worries about if paths to the same file are really identical, etc) and while this is by no means a game-changer, it is just nicer that way.