| I tried WSL2 for about six months. I'm really glad that MS is investing in this and it's an aspect that has been long neglected. If you're a developer, and unless you're using MS stack (.NET), the experience has been always subpar. I have to agree with the author that the experience is not quite there yet. But a lot of progress has been done. And I hope the progress continues and maybe in the future I'll try it again. For me there is not a single deal breaker, but it's just a thousand paper cuts. Removing those will take time. Some of the annoying things I encountered: 1. Overall slowness. It's not only startup, it's in general. Not only on heavy tasks like parallel compiling, but even for lightweight stuff, you immediately notice when you try a real linux. 2. Some config like setting up ssh-agent correctly are hard and different than a real linux. No idea why. 3. Windows Terminal development is quite fast, and sometimes things change or break. For instance, the background color of my terminal suddenly changed and I had no idea why. After some googling and modifying config, it was fixed. 4. The fact that it required to sign in for Windows Preview program. (I think this is not required anymore) but it was very annoying as it requires very long updates that require like a million reboots. No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update. Additionally, after every update there was always surprises. From the harmless Edge popping up from nowhere asking you to become default browser for the nth time, to some hardware misconfiguration. Nothing too bad, but annoying. 5. (This one very subjective of course) The windows UI overall is, how to say it, a mess. Font rendering is awful. The mix of old style UI with new style UI is horrible. Some settings will be in new style, some other settings will be in old style. As I said, I might try again in the future. But now I switched to Fedora and I'm really really happy with Gnome 3 and good old real Linux. I still have the Windows partition just in case, but I haven't booted in a while. |
It's an interesting tangent, but Insider Preview updates are fascinating from a technical standpoint. Nearly every single one is installed closer to how Windows' big "Feature Updates" work (as essentially full Windows images that get built to a new folder, all the old things installed back into it, then the old Windows folder archived or removed) than old school sets of patches to individual files. It's been interesting as an Insider since very early in Windows 10's life to see how much faster these updates have gotten over time. Installing lots of updates this way on Insider Preview machines seems to have helped a lot make the big "Feature Updates" themselves faster/better/more reliable. It's maybe not as obvious to someone installing a big Feature Update at most twice a year, but as a long time Windows user and having seen the gradient of change in Insiders Preview (and read some of what I could in their discussions on the technical efforts on blogs), it has been fascinating to watch.
WSL2 should be out of preview in the soon-to-be-rolled-out May 2020 feature update.