Is the Windows Subsystem for Linux worth it?

Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 32 points –

I've had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.

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I am a software developer and am forced to have Windows on my work computer. WSL allows me to have a Linux terminal that I can use directly on my files without needed a VM.

Same. Well, not forced, but using Linux would just make everything more difficult. I like being able to drop to a shell and use a Linux environment with its useful utilities to manipulate stuff on my Windows PC.

Yeah, I could use mingw, but that is a pain, and I can't just apt install stuff.

Not the same as apt, but there's Chocolately, which is actually a legitimate package manager for Windows.

choco install firefox

There's also a package called gsudo which allows you to preface a PowerShell command with sudo to run it as an administrator. It will cause a UAC prompt.

sudo choco update all

I guess that's a bonus.

But being forced to use a terminal to do anything is kinda hard to deal with if you're not a developer. I'm probably guessing this didn't bother you that much.

I prefer the terminal and have tools I like to use that are CLI only.

Edit: and Linux only.

What are you trying to do on WSL? I think the whole point of WSL originally was to have a linux terminal on Windows, before they added graphics in WSL 2.

I was trying to run applications on it, similar to their Windows Subsystem for Android that they released as an update to Windows 11. I have to say, the latter is significantly easier to deal with imo.