Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.
Linux has a lot of inherent advantages here, like much deeper terminal support that let an agent make changes to practically any system setting on your behalf. Most importantly, if all else fails, the LLM agent can always check the source code to debug what's going on at the root, if you're using Linux. They don't have the option in Windows or MacOS.
This could mean that at some point, ironically Linux becomes the most user-friendly operating system for regular people as their AIs can diagnose and fix system issues and problems for them more easily than they can with proprietary operating systems.
Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux. If I were in charge there would be a team devoted to fixing this a decade ago.
WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always been hacks around this, but for many devs the easiest hack was to ditch Windows.
They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse. Linux is open source.
I was trying WSL years ago and this is one of the reasons I just moved to a full linux server instead. We still have way too many problems interfacing across filesystems. I hope with AI we will see an iteration on ExFAT that has all the journalling, versioning etc. magic of modern FS' and can be adopted across all 3 OSes. Probably a long shot but I can dream :)
80% is being generous. I gave up on USB for WSL altogether and just pass the whole controller through with Hyper-V. On laptops, though, that is not always possible.
I was always disappointed with the design of wsl2. The wsl1 design of a syscall layer atop NT had greater architectural purity. They way I heard it, they introduced a virtual machine into the design specifically in order to bypass poor NT filesystem performance. I'm sure it's easier said than done, but it would have been nice if they instead fixed the issues on the NT side, rather than side step them with a VM.
Nice, FWIW this is currently pretty easy to solve by just keeping your stuff on a separate EXT4 volume and then mounting that under Windows. Windows accessing a mounted EXT4 volume through WSL is much faster than the other way around.
it's kinda shocking how both WSL2 file perf and Docker for Mac file perf are so horrendously bad that you can just tank performance and have a 3x better local dev setup on most projects by using "normal" Linux.... and yet it's been the status quo for so long.
I don't get how people are so comfortable with dev tooling being as busted as it is.
Nice to see a bit of good news here, WSL is an underrated component in enterprises, and quite often the only way you can get close to Linux. Windows and Macs feel like trading one cancer for another with different logos.
It's always good to see improvements around WSL2, but especially this one is not so relevant IMHO, since it only affects WLS2 file access to Windows file system. If you store your dev environment in WSL2 anyway, this won't help you.
Corporate mandate to use windows. Crowdstrike scans make doing anything on the command line a non-starter. For example, adding mise to my powershell prompt adds multiple seconds! to each powershell command execution... it's just not even feasible at that point to work in Windows. WSL resolves these issues.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 63.5 ms ] threadAnd for what it’s worth, that version isn’t available yet when I try to update WSL.
Hopefully, they will just push it out to everyone asap. We make heavy use of symlinks into Windows drives.
This could mean that at some point, ironically Linux becomes the most user-friendly operating system for regular people as their AIs can diagnose and fix system issues and problems for them more easily than they can with proprietary operating systems.
WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always been hacks around this, but for many devs the easiest hack was to ditch Windows.
They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse. Linux is open source.
However, the shell for WSL2 runs in a window that grabs things, such as ^V.
So, ssh from WSL2 (to AWS for example) is awkward. For exampl, Emacs on the AWS box is almost unusable.
Was really disappointed when WSL2 came along and just virtualized everything; fs performance took a shit.
Anyway I don't care about windows these days, all Linux all the time.
I don't get how people are so comfortable with dev tooling being as busted as it is.
WSL saves me to install them.
Additionally, I only care about running Linux containers, everything else I run on native Windows, so the filesystem performance isn't an issue.