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.
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 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.
For me: totally. I need to use windows for work. With WSL, I can use all the tools I need via the Debian box underneath. All I use windows for are the communication apps my colleagues use.
Apart from work: nope. Full time Linux kinda guy
From what I gather teams-for-linux still uses the web version doesn’t it? Would that not be subject to all the same problems?
I had been using WSL2 for about one year. The experience was terrible compared to a Linux host. (Sadly I can’t change the system on my work laptop). However, it was much better than Cygwin, msys2 and powershell - based on my experience.
If your host OS is windows and you’re interested in Linux, I think WSL2 is a good way to have a try
WSL is great for me. Not as fast as being in native Linux but if you’re stuck in windows it’s a impressively seamless tool to just have available. I use it for convenience so I don’t have to have a second machine next to me all day
Best thing available on windows, still suffers from running on windows, but inside is a pretty usable Linux distro
