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Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

To be fair WSL is quite cursed. There are a lot of things Microsoft has done that result in less than good workarounds.

In my experience, WSL2 works like a dream. I have nothing but good things to say about it.

WSL1 was sort of clunky and slow but I feel no difference from using native Linux in WSL2. Plus, the VS Code integration for it is spectacular.

Second that. I was tepid on WSL on initial release, but recently decided to try a full switch after hearing good things and I'm glad I did. You're literally using a full Linux distro, it's really fast, and it even has neat integrations with windows like allowing use of windows explorer if you're inclined. And it's totally seamless to use with vscode.

Remote VS Code for WSL feels sometimes clunky to me.

Another option: running Emacs as GUI App in WSL.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/wsl-tutorial

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...

So far I managed to get by using wsl just for redis, most software packages these days do actually have decent windows version, including pytorch etc. I considered switching over to wsl more, but I ran to wsl being very slow in terms of filesystem access, I think it had something to do with wsl 1 being (somewhat?) native while wsl 2 runs under hyperv. I think it's still not fixed.

Rancher Desktop is very slow. There must be a driver (virtio?) issue in their WSL VM.

Podman is much faster.

Wsl2 has been significantly faster for me as long as I store the files in the wsl drive. I had react projects that would completely fail to get through npm install on windows but finished no problem on wsl.

Microsoft docu seems to recommend wsl 2 as well. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versio...

Quite the opposite - WSL(2) is one of the best things that have come out of MS in a long time.

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