When WSL2 first came out, some losers on /g/ were cheering that it would "make Linux obsolete". Four years later, I think it's safe to say they were kinda missing the point.
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Combines the power of a really half-arsed Linux distro with the pure speed of the Windows file system.
I mean, it's slightly better than nothing, but installing a real Linux distro on Windows through eg. VirtualBox absolutely fucks it into the bin. I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
I use it a lot - I use my main rig for gaming and general stuff, but also need to be able to program things; rather than dealing with dual booting and the headaches it brings (including limited hardware support), I use docker with WSL2.
I am able to launch VS Code or PhpStorm on my local, have it remote into WSL and run things how they’re meant to be ran on a Linux box, without dealing with installing windows specific variants.
This makes working with things like Laravel/Composer a lot easier and with everything built on docker, deploying to prod is as simple as a docker image push to my registry of choice.
I also enjoy the benefits of not having a bunch of dependencies sitting around - drop the container and you’re system is as clean as it was before
I understand that this doesn't work for everyone but I'm kinda the reverse. My entire workflow relies on Linux, but I occasionally play video games. I'd say any game without aggressive anti cheat works fine on Linux nowadays.
The one good thing that came about for me from Reddit was realizing I’m not the target gamer demographic anymore. It really opened up my mind to realize if I’m not enjoying or playing online multiplayer anyways what do I have to lose?
I was so afraid of potentially missing out on the one or two games I’d actually be interested in playing that I stayed on windows even when it only gave me a pain in the ass every other quarter. Nowadays If the game doesn’t work on Linux it doesn’t deserve my money, and that isn’t as big a compromise as I thought.
I’ve not been able to get full performance of games on Linux; then you add on lack of support for mouse/keyboard/headsets and it just becomes easier to have a windows setup to play games
I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
That's me pretty much. Locked down low spec Windows 10 laptop that would probably suffocate under the weight of a full VM anyway, so I'm happy to have access to a proper Linux shell with a nice-ish terminal that's a lot less clunky than "git bash", MingW etc.
I use it for ad hoc scripting and things like interacting with webservices (curl), massaging text files with tools like jq, sed, awk and to use Azure and AWS cli tools to interact with cloud infrastructure.
I don’t see who WSL is for.
My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn't destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn't expect it to succeed either. Microsoft's strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn't. When you're as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred losses.
Given that Docker/Podman heavily rely on WSL to work on windows, I would argue that it definitely has succeeded