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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

WSL is so buggy it's hilarious calling it "awesome". It's a hack and it manifests in various ways, often. You will become quite acquainted with "taskkill /f /im wsl.exe"

It's had many bumps in the road. Networking, VPNs, filesystem etc.

I'm trying to use it right now. "apt-get install dotnet-sdk-8.0" and the system is now totally unresponsive and commands are hanging. I have no idea what it's doing.

It's actually a great advert for native Linux. If your hardware works OK with Linux, run it, and put Windows in a VM if you really need Office/Power BI etc

(Hyper-V on the desktop is also a joke. The Ubuntu from the gallery (which I presumed would be properly designed, tested, QAd etc) had an issue installing the set up packages from apt. It was doing 1 every 5 minutes - maybe a networking bug or something. I gave up)

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I just popped open WSL2 on my home desktop and ran "apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0" and it ran perfectly fine? It took maybe 10 seconds to install... 13 packages.

I started playing around with WSL1 shortly after it was released. Lady year, at a new employer (primarily a Windows based shop), I started using WSL2 daily. I have never had to manually kill the WSL process.

I wonder what's so different between our installations and systems to cause our experiences to be so different here.

It's not just me and my system. Go look at open github issues, some of the most commented, each of which have 1-400+ comments:

Jul 2022 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8529 "All WSL commands hang (including wsl --shutdown) but WSL is constantly using 30-40% CPU "

May 2021 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982 "High CPU usage"

Jun 2022 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8529 "All WSL commands hang (including wsl --shutdown) but WSL is constantly using 30-40% CPU "

Jul 2019 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197 "[wsl2] filesystem performance is much slower than wsl1 in /mnt"

Feb 2020 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4901 "Very slow network speed on WSL2"

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was just you. I definitely believe you and others have the problems you do, we're talking about Microsoft software here.

Same experience here. I've used WSL2 as a daily driver for work for 2 years now. It feels so close to being "awesome," but the rough edges are maddening. The issues are slowly being addressed, but I still can't recommend any use it over native Linux - at least for a work machine that you don't have full control over.

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