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Nicw.

I'm still going into a docker for linux on windows dev but want to play with using WSL2 for this cycle (deploy is to linux machines / container images). Mostly just need to figure out tooling setup (pycharm / vs code)

Is this already out?
It must've been tough to give up on WSL1 (to call it something), but it really sucked. It was full of bugs.
Huge wsl fan, really think software developers don’t know how good windows is for software dev
You could run native Linux with VMware, VirtualBox forever if you mean a Linux environment on your Windows made any difference.
I mean... Native 1-click support is pretty different from any of the previous solutions...
There has been always options (VM, cygwin etc) but WSL made this very fluent experience.

Interesting to see how WSL2 feels now that Linux things are actually running in separate VM.

Also WSL’s filesystem integration is flawless
How do drivers work? Like if I have an app talking to ALSA or something, can I get output from Windows?
They could in theory implement a sound device for the virtual kernel though I cannot see any information that they have actually done that from a quick search.

Some people have worked around this issue by setting up pulseaudio for windows and then connecting pulseaudio via network from WSL out to Windows. Works for both WSL1 and WSL2.

While this is a nice development, I personally still require running VMs and Hyper-V's GUI/console support is so limited I'm going to be forced to stick with VirtualBox for VMs.

Fortunately, Cygwin is fine for basic shell/utility stuff and using Cygwin also means that I can continue to use ssh-pageant (talks to putty's ssh agent) which isn't possible under WSL.

WSL appears to have significant adoption already.

Is there any advantage over simple multibooting?

Only semi-snarky answer: The song and dance of drivers, and not having to reboot.

Plenty of mainstream PC configs are going to be a hassle to get to functional parity on the Linux side. You can complain "it's deliberately crippled hardware/bad drivers" but odds are, the guy buying the fleet PCs are not checking if they're Linux-friendly.

If I just want to run some command-line dev tools, I can probably get there faster by installing WSL than trying to start with a Ubuntu ISO and setting up the nVidia drivers.

When the one buying the fleet PC's is a Bozo what can you do?

Give full credit to them for the capabilities while fully documenting the limitations compared to alternative choices.

When you start looking at what Microsoft can offer now re: Microsoft365, Dynamics365, Power Platform, Sharepoint, Azure, wsl, massive sales dept. with years of experience, etc., why would the enterprise ever go with anything else? Something tells me Azure will end up kicking Amazon's ass in the end.
That's what my company is doing. We're small, already a Windows shop, so it just makes sense to centralize on Azure.
I'm now very interested what the performance comparing docker on mac vs docker on WSL2 looks like!

Why spend $4.000 on new mac for development if you can get $2.000 windows 10 machine that will give you same/similar/better? performance.