Comment by jesse_dot_id
13 hours ago
I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.
WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.
WSL is getting better, even with minor releases. It's the only reason I didn't switch my most recent corporate provided laptop.
Sadly the rest of Windows 11 suffers from those unasked, opt-out feature drops. Unbearable. So, I'll go pure Linux again.
What is "real work" in this context? I'm guessing from the context it's Linux kernel or driver development? Or perhaps bioinformatics workflows which use linux-only programs in some cases, especially with CLI-driven workflows?
I think that because the majority of people in HN work building SaaS, they tend to do Linux server related work heavily. The ones that dont, do iPhone work, so they are in a worst place (with Windows).
Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.
I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.
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Some of us also do real work on Windows, ask Valve.
Interesting take since Valve with Proton has done a lot to increase gaming on Desktop Linux also their console devices.
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Sure and there are billion dollar systems at every bank that runs entirely on VBA macros in excel doesn't mean its not structurally flawed.
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Is the excuse of teenagers every August when they ask for the latest and greatest laptop?
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Delightful way to write off an enormous cohort of people and huge variety of work.
Being exactly in GP situation, I would give a more charitable take.
We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.
Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!
I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.
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I spend most of time in meetings and updating excel sheets.
Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.
Those machines generally come locked down, so you need permission to install stuff like WSL. I had such a machine and asked if they could unlock WSL, and their answer was no, because Security was busy enough keeping the Windows installs reasonably secure. Which makes sense tbf. Would be surprised if that was much different in other places.
Honestly the performance hit of WSl even being alive and running in the background of my XPS was so bad I just ssh into a workstation and do everything on there instead. Trying to get windows to just be usable is such a massive pain in the ass.
Would be ok, except for the fact that I like to run GUI applications on linux as well. Remote access for gui is a pain.
Luckily I'm allowed use Hyper-V for Linux work
Guess where WSL runs on?
I had the opposite experience.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.
WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).
The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.
I'm surprised to hear that about laptops. When I first switched to Linux in 2003, laptops were supposedly a somewhat iffy thing. When I got my first laptop in 2007, I had to do a bit of research, but ultimately ended up with a ThinkPad where everything worked fine, modulo the need for proprietary graphics drivers as was common at the time. Since then, I don't think I've ever stressed about whether a laptop would be properly supported. I am easily believe that maybe some things are a little better in Windows (maybe automatic firmware update, or the CPU governor), but which laptops are "not very well supported" by Linux these days?
I never trust people saying "it works well". Heck, even Canonical lies in their certification program, since they may test with custom distros that they may not release (yeah, it's this crazy).
My last machine, according to reviewers, worked "well" on Linux. After I purchased it, I've found that the battery lasts half of what it lasts in Windows. And other stuff.
No doubt that there are 100% compatible machines (Thinkpads, typically), but again, it limits choice.
In the mid to 2000's at IBM, many of us developers and even quite a few regular business people in marketing ran Desktop Linux on Thinkpads, it worked extremely well. I assume they still do.
Does Linux support hibernate or suspend well, 30 years after both technologies have been introduced?
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> I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported.
No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.
Dell, having one of the most popular engineering laptops of the past decade (xps). It's not surprising that it would have better than average support.
me when i lie
Yeah, WSL was the gateway to daily driving for me. I'd played with Linux as a kid, came back via WSL, and quickly came to the conclusion I'd be best off without Windows.
Haven't regretted it for a second.
Did you work out of /mnt/c?
My problems weren't performance related, aside from the occasional catastrophic memory leak; most of my biggest headaches were related to networking.
They finally fixed the networking thing a while back.
In current WSL2, Windows owns the IP address, the NIC, DHCP, ARP, etc, and it’s shared with the Linux VM.
It’s really kinda magic… Linux sees the same IP address as windows does, and you actually get address-in-use errors if Linux tries to listen on a port Windows is already listening on, and vice-versa. So there’s no NAT going on or any internal 172.x net within the Linux VM, you just run “ip addr show” and you see the same real IP addresses that “ipconfig” shows you in windows.
(I no longer have a windows installation but WSL2 got noticeably better with networking some time before I gave up on windows.)
Also no, I didn't.
I suspect they did. 100% of cases where people complain WSL2 was slow and I helped debug was this specific incorrect usage.
I did the same, fighting WSL constantly with some other random conflicting stuff. Moved to Ubuntu and honestly things just work. _Maybe_ 2026/27 will finally be the year of linux desktop.
For me Win11 was the final stop.
I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.