I'm heavily invested in Linux for years already, a i3+terminal+firefox+emacs guy.
I forced myself to work on Windows 10 Enterprise for a week and left kind of feeling OK about it. It's a bit slower than Linux, a bit too many moving things by default and I definitely prefer the env vars and config files over registry and control panel. But. I didn't use WSL or WSL2. I just had nushell and Microsoft's terminal app, with winget and all that. Some keyboard shortcuts and multiple desktops enabled, writing Rust software with emacs, firefox and a good terminal was not bad at all. I would not dislike working more in there, but in the end find Arch Linux to be the end game OS for me, so keeping the installation just when I need to debug some Windows issues.
I actually have been trying this recently! I've been using VS Code via SSH into a WSL2 container running on my windows box and it's been going surprisingly well.... but that was after a moderate amount of effort to get WSL2 working to begin with, which was partially complicated by my past efforts of getting WSL1 to do similar behavior. I'm also not 100% confident NewCorp's IT would be kosher with me spooling that up. I could be wrong, but it seemed easier to go with the lower-number-of-abstractions-to-get-an-acceptable-experience via mac at the time.
Though who knows! Maybe I'll change my mind and get a new machine :)
> that was after a moderate amount of effort to get WSL2 working to begin with, which was partially complicated by my past efforts of getting WSL1 to do similar behavior.
Could you explain more?
I know installing and switching to WSL2 isn't as straightforward on windows stable. Is that what you are referring to?
If so, on insider - you can run wsl --install and it will work.
If not running wsl2 by default, wsl --set-default-version 2
I think they could make it easy to onboard users by setting better defaults and decreasing friction.
I had to fight with enabling/disabling Hyper-V in windows features for a while, and also somewhere I flashed the BIOS on my motherboard and it reset my virtualization-enable switch to "off" (which I guess was the default?)
50/50 PEBKAC and Windows being difficult, IMO, but my total unfamiliarity with troubleshooting windows made the process a bit more annoying than I felt it ought to be.
I forced myself to work on Windows 10 Enterprise for a week and left kind of feeling OK about it. It's a bit slower than Linux, a bit too many moving things by default and I definitely prefer the env vars and config files over registry and control panel. But. I didn't use WSL or WSL2. I just had nushell and Microsoft's terminal app, with winget and all that. Some keyboard shortcuts and multiple desktops enabled, writing Rust software with emacs, firefox and a good terminal was not bad at all. I would not dislike working more in there, but in the end find Arch Linux to be the end game OS for me, so keeping the installation just when I need to debug some Windows issues.