Comment by chris_money202

13 hours ago

You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c. A lot of people make this mistake and then complain that WSL is slow. On the native linux file system WSL is 100x faster for everything

On my work laptop I made the lazy/naive mistake of mounting my projects from macOS into devcontainers running in Colima.

vscode extensions using ripgrep in parallel in the background (there are many!) are killing the vm.

I now decided to follow Mitchell Hashimoto choice and use VMware Fusion and simply do all my work inside of it.

On top of the performance issue you mentioned, /mnt/c will be case-insensitive and trip up lots of Linux software!

That's the entire appeal of WSL (for me). A single source checkout I can work on from both sides; no inconsistency of forgetting that I need to apply changes twice.

Without it, I can just as well ssh into another box.

  • I've generally found it better to do it other way around - keep all the stuff in Linux partition and from Windows side access that over the virtual network share \\wsl.localhost\<Distro>\home\me\whatever

  • I do this on wsl1 without issue. wsl2 has an experimental new virtual (or just remote?) fs you can enable but I have not tested it.

From the perspective of user empathy, wsl seems to be designed for that use case. but the implementation/defaults can be improved

I do not really follow how you would avoid this if you are using WSL containers with dev containers. Wouldn't this be the default?

>You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c.

Source?

  • Microsoft now launches a pop-up discourging this, so that is my source. Also my own personal experience using WSL for 8 years.

    You can very easily measure this as well, use any disk benchmark