WSL for Development in Windows 10 Is the New Kool-Aid. Still Not Using It? (opens in new tab)

> a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards.

IMAO the right term. If you think Linux development is cool and awesome then doing that on a Windows machine is about the worst choice I can think of. The operating system that invades your privacy so aggressively that you become the product after you have bought a license for a couple of hundreds of dollars.. With all the awesome free Linux distro's available it keeps stunning me that people are willing to pay for an OS that is being made to invade and milk your life..

> "The phrase originates from events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. The movement's leader [...] Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs which had been prepared by his aides."

TIL. I always thought the expression somehow referred to the drink itself, or perhaps its brand.

It's easy to see how it got to mean "follow an idea of perceived potential high rewards", especially since the phrase itself sounds (vaguely) positive. Since people started using literally meaning figuratively, such changes no longer surprise me.

https://www.koolaid.com/ shows children's products that is a fun mixture of many items. There are also links that share recipes using these terms like https://www.food.com/recipe/absolutely-perfect-kool-aid-3338...

Also as History would have it, this was first coined perhaps in Nebraska, for commercial purpose as put in the article https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/kool-aid.

I think there are many such terms in English that has polar opposite meanings/cannotations/usages. "Swasthik" is supposedly a very pious symbol for the Hindus. Incidentally, the Nazis used a similar or closely resembling symbol but had never called it Swastik/Swastika. And yet the cunning colonial British popularized that as Swastik and the world continues to refer to it so instead of calling it merely Nazi symbol.

Well, you're a step ahead of me, I've never even got VirtualBox working with Hyper-V

I'm genuinely curious, what's your use case? Most stuff should be covered by WSL itself or Docker, I imagine.

No experience with Conemu and WSL, but Windows Terminal [1] provides smooth experience.

WSL2 has a completely new approach than WSL1, so compatibility is better.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

It used to be so but is so much better and stable these days. For every such issue that I have faced, I have put it as ProTips in one blog post, esp. for my own reference, as much as for others going through similar experience. Follow it all, and you too should fall in love with the workflow ;)

I switched to Fedora precisely because I see wsl2 as EEE and a small part of the soft lock-in MS wants their OS users to have.

I consider it one of the pillars of Satya's Schemes, along with Tile UIs/wasted space UX everywhere, telemetry all the things, and user is ^NOT in control (we pretend he is until next update, which he definitely is not in control of).

At least it will likely "extinguish" the Windows support on node, Python etc. packages using native code. There will be less interest to make those builds work on native Windows as majority of developers using Windows desktop are likely to jump to WSL side.

To say nothing of platform lock-in.

What are the arguments against VirtualBox?

Yeah, I haven't used Windows properly in decades, and a recent sojourn into its new territory has left me befuddled - how does anyone put up with all that crap? So many things getting in my way of productivity, just straight out of the box.

I have a session scheduled with a Windows-guru friend of mine, to show me how to turn ALL the non-productive shit off in a base Windows 10 install, but frankly I'm terrified of the consequences. Basic OS things don't even seem to work when you don't let Microsoft track you - WTF, people?!!

I kind of miss bash, after being forced to move to zsh, because bash is generally faster, and consumes less resources - but with oh-my-zsh, I kind of get the point, because darn it is pretty, and I continue to blow away some of the greybeards in my group when they shoulder surf and see me type 'z something' -> goes to /some/monstrous/path/to/something .. this, for some reason, always gets oohs and aahs ...

Just, gotta remember, that feeling like you need to upgrade your laptop just because you changed SHELLS is rarely a good sign.

I use it, but mostly because oh-my-zsh makes it nice and pretty while being low maintenance. I don’t think it is any more or less capable than bash.

you don't need the 2004 update, if you have 1903 or newer, you can install it.

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-2-support-is-...]

I received the update to 2004 in the last week. Maybe check again?

I’ve been using linux since January. But the number of issues I’ve run into compared to windows is far more.

When linux works it’s way better. But when it breaks it’s harder to fix than windows.

I tried out pop!_os due to people on HN liking it. At first it was great. But then I realised I can’t transfer files between drives. I thought maybe it was just my desktop computer, but the same issue happened when I put it on my laptops. So I went to kubuntu, no transfer issues, but trying to fix the weird ui issues compared to gnome make it frustrating.

So I tried out Ubuntu but that randomly freezes with 5700xt errors, which I fixed by upgrading the kernel, but then realised that I can’t use 5.8 with virtual box so I had to downgrade to 5.7 but that resulted in random reboots.

Day to day use when it works tho. I much prefer it.

If I got it right, once Hyper-V is enabled, your existing Windows installation boots on top of/under/alongside the hypervisor (kinda-sorta like Xen's Dom0). This setup prevents other virtualization solutions from running, but allows the use of Windows Sandbox, WSL2 as well as regular Hyper-V VMs.

Used figuratively in the sense of https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/kool-aid.

We are today living in a world where for every proverb there is an anti :P

Agree. Poorly titled, I looked at it expecting an argument about WSL being over-hyped.

In my now over 25 years of dual-booting multiple OSes (usually Windows, Linux, and *BSD) on multiple machines, I've never had Windows nuke other partitions during updates.

Never. Ever. And I'm one of those crazy people who don't re-install Windows. My main machines have been upgraded(!!) from Windows XP all the way up to Windows 10 2004 without hick-ups and with all partitions of the other OSes intact.

I would seriously like to see some hard evidence for claims like common(!) loss of data due to lost partitions. I just can't believe I've just been lucky all those years...

What did you have to do to fix your connection issues? I've been getting weird WSL2 problems with the network for the longest time, maybe what you did might help me too.

I have been working for a month this way and it has been smooth so far.

I like Windows 10, but I stopped using it as my main work OS because I've always had to fight with it to do what I need to. Switching to a Linux desktop was super easy for me.

> I had issues with font rendering, low fps animations and firefox/chrome stuttering while scrolling through pages.

I had some of these problems when I first setup my Manjaro/XFCE workstations which are 2 desktops and 1 laptop. However, they needed to be solved exactly once, by toggling some settings, and they were gone forever.

Meanwhile on Windows I have problems that I've never solved, like how I'll be playing Rocket League and all of a sudden the num-lock on my keyboard will suddenly turn off and my keyboard commands won't work until I turn it back on. In the past, when I've stopped playing to look, I saw that Windows 10 was basically doing updates smack in the middle of my "active hours" while I'm playing a game.

When I was using Windows 10 to do all of my work (mostly with Node.js, some Python, some Go, some C#), I couldn't use Docker and VirtualBox at the same time because Hyper-V is required by Docker and also by WSL. Aside from that, I had a plethora of smaller issues. Things like Node scripts containing ampersands only working in CMD.EXE and not PowerShell. Or, like some NPM packages just not working on Windows at all. Perhaps my biggest frustration for years was how long Yarn or NPM would take to install packages on Windows, even after I spent hours researching what settings to change in Windows to make it better.

I'm so happy I switched away from Windows for work because now I have none of these problems. I'm the type of guy who likes to keep things very simple. Why mix all of the problems of Windows with all of the problems from Linux when I can more easily conquer them separately? I'm also a minimalist and XFCE does a minimalist Windows-like environment way, way better and more conveniently than Windows 10 ever could. XFCE also contains features that I like from 7+ taskbar tweaker right out of the box, like being able to middle-click taskbar items to close the window.

Even doing C#/.NET Core on Linux is smoother IMO. The only thing I really miss from Windows is SSMS, but only when I'm working with SQL Server which is happening less and less these days. Azure Data Studio is catching up though and may eventually surpass SSMS.

Anyway, I also have a couple of Macs and I can complain for hours in detail about all of the operating systems that I use. Here's one now: Every Linux desktop (been trying them for 15 years before I finally switched) has confused the sort order icons. They use a down pointing arrow for sorting letters from a-Z, which is wrong for a left-to-right language. That is one issue I have not been able to fix myself because it's a very old decision that is baked into lots of different Linux software.

Yup and in fact I'm genuinely finding that it's giving me less grief than developing on a Mac did.

Some people are better at SEO and spreading their blog posts on social media. One of the reasons I avoid social media.

Fair enough reason for you to try WSL on Windows. So you can switch between your coding and gaming in a jiffy.

This is where WSL shines and as the blog post says how you can get the best of both worlds ;)