WSL2: What are you using it for?

[Easy Rhino]

Anyone here using WSL2 on their Windows box? I installed it just to play with it. I guess you could use it if you wanted to develop on Linux while being on Windows. Seems pointless to me. Thoughts?

 

[Flanker]

I use it to code in Visual Studio (old habits die hard and most of my work are for Windows), and debug the stuff in WSL2 before deploying it to an actual Linux machine.
The use case is quite limited, but when I need to do something like that, it's pretty neat.

 

[sam_86314]

I had initially used it for SSH and some other stuff, but PuTTY is better for that anyway.

I wish WSL could do more. Honestly, I find it better to just use my dedicated Linux box since it doesn't have the same limitations.

 

[xkm1948]

I use WSL2 through the Windows Terminal setup and the experience has been flawless.

As a day 1 adopter of WSL, I have been using this exclusively for my work. Most bioinformatics programs are written for Linux environment only. Having WSL2 with comparable performance versus a hardware level Linux implementation is quite convenient. Having native access to all windows files directly is a huge deal for me. For my raw data processing and initial work I can get them done in WSL2. With data dimension reduced I can switch to Windows based graphing and plot generator seamlessly without constant transferring between Windows and Linux partition.

I find myself dual booting to mint less and less often since I upgraded from WSL1 to WSL2. The few times I did was only because I needed CUDA for some specific stage of my workflow.

With that said, Nvidia is working with Microsoft to enable CUDA on WSL2 (it already is in experimental support in insider build). Once that drops I will probably have even less desire to dual boot into my linux distro haha