With WSL2, Windows 11 could easily have been the best Linux distribution on the planet, supporting all Windows apps while also giving you the full power of Linux at your terminal.
Unfortunately Microsoft decided to stuff it with user hostile spyware instead.
Eh, no. WSL2 is kind of bad compared to a proper Linux environment, you'll encounter so many tiny cuts that eventually you'll yearn for a proper environment where stuff just works instead of having to fight against the built-in "interoperability" stuff Microsoft has added that just gets in the way and introduces new issues.
Saying this as someone who've used both Linux and Windows as a main OS for decades, and would dump Windows 100% if I could get Ableton to run properly on Linux. I'm still using WSL2 from time to time, but for things I need to be productive with, I prefer my Linux environment 99% of the time.
I like WSL2 as a polished way to launch VMs in Windows. It's been good for testing out Linux software in an odd environment, but I haven't figured out how to enable SELinux or the systemd firewall on the Red Hat variants.
My trick is to use git bash as my primary shell on windows and Podman for Windows (not desktop / just the cli app). It's still not nearly as nice as using Arch but a reasonable approximation in a pinch.
Well, sounds worse as everything has to be a container then? I'll just continue with the slightly borked Arch-inside-WSL2 setup I have for that instead, as it kind of works, and continue to mostly run Arch bare metal when I can.
No, only containerized things need to be in a container. For everything else you are just using Windows except it feels more Linux like with git bash and has most basic Linux tools. If you need to run a container it is a lot more like it is on Linux podman container run ... right in your Windows shell (git bash in my case). This does things behind the scenes with a podman WSL image but it is mostly seamless.
I do actually start up Arch / Ubuntu / whatever in WSL for some things but mostly just use the above setup which is most Linux like without having to shell into WSL all the time. That being said, I use actual Linux / Arch whenever I can - yeah, I use Arch btw.
> No, only containerized things need to be in a container. For everything else you are just using Windows except it feels more Linux like with git bash and has most basic Linux tools.
But developer focused software is trash on Windows, if I want to remain productive I need a Linux environment so I can just run stuff without having to fuck around to configure it for Windows and what not.
Oh ok. If you use podman instead there isn't as much friction. Just type "podman" instead of "docker" as the commands are the same.
winget install -e --id RedHat.Podman
podman run --it --rm -p 8000:8000 .. image
For gitbash, add a new profile in Windows Terminal and find "bash.exe" in Program Files\Git (sorry I can't remember the details and not on Windows right now). Once you have this you can use normal Linux commands, setup a .bashrc, ls, cd ~, vi, etc.
Anyway, food for thought in case you want to try a different workflow one day.
Where exactly does this run? Podman/Docker makes no difference, doesn't it? You still need to run a VM (WSL2 on Windows), so might as well run those directly in the WSL2 environment I already have? But again, docker in WSL2 doesn't work as directly on Linux, for whatever reason.
> For gitbash, add a new profile in Windows Terminal and find "bash.exe" in Program Files\Git (sorry I can't remember the details and not on Windows right now). Once you have this you can use normal Linux commands, setup a .bashrc, ls, cd ~, vi, etc.
Been there and tried that, and "git bash" on Windows is probably the worst mixmatch, and bunch of tooling gets confused when the shell is bash but the actual host is Windows.
Also used WSL2, and keep hitting sharp edges. Last issue involved not being able to properly use the GPU through Docker running in WSL2 on a Arch installation, and Windows "helpfully" aliasing .exe's available on the host OS into the guest, confusing a lot of the stack.
A year ago or something, changing the size of the WSL disk via some Powershell command also corrupted the disk after it was done, I had to start from scratch which was a bit annoying.
Unfortunately Microsoft decided to stuff it with user hostile spyware instead.