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Abner Soares Alves Junior
Abner Soares Alves Junior

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Booting WSL2 faster

What is WSL2?

For those who don't know what is this. Basically, it is a Linux kernel running in a lightweight VM inside of Windows 10. Allowing you to install some distributions like Ubuntu, Arch, and Debian.

This version 2 becomes with many performances, and other, improvements, which makes it more usable for day-to-day coding.

The Issue

I've been using the Ubuntu distribution, combined with Zsh + Oh-My-Zsh, and recently it's started going really slow during the boot time.

Time to start using the terminal has increased a lot and I didn't change any configs, only updated the Windows. The time to code was more than 20 sec.

Possible Solution. Worked For Me

Reading through a lot of Github Issues on WSL repo, I found one comment that suggests turn off the Windows Firewall. Lots of people upvoted this solution. To my surprise, It worked.

Don't ask me why this worked. I'm not too familiar with how all those things work, but maybe something blocks the process during some check steps in the firewall. Like an anti-virus that slows some application.

In case you have had this kind of experience and solved, or know why to turn off firewall works, drop a comment.

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