BackGround
My first laptop at college was a pretty low spec (I had no other option). It had an intel i3 4th gen processor and 4 Gb RAM (Ouch!) with Windows. In the beginning, it was smooth (sort of), but had no trouble. Then as the days passed the machine became very sluggish, like booting it up took a millennium. Then I got into programming and found Linux. I dual-booted my laptop with Ubuntu and it was a breath of fresh air. It was not lagging and it was pretty snappy. As days went on I learned more about Linux and the various distros, then I erased the drive and installed PopOs. Everything was going well.
Renaissance
Then I decided to go for my master's. Finally, I decided to get a new laptop, with better specs. I went for Ryzen 7 5800H, RTX 3050Ti, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, and 512 GB NVMe SSD. As a Linux lover, I wanted to install a new distro on my new machine. I tried distro after distro with the bootable USB drive, and there were always some critical issues. The most crucial issue was I can not find WiFi drivers. I know that somewhere on the internet I can find it, but it takes a lot of time.
Found It!
While I was into researching Linux, I came across WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). In a nutshell, WSL allows you to run Linux in Windows! It is in version 2 now. As we all know the heart of Linux is the command line. If you ask me the command line makes Linux, Linux. It took some time to install it, but Microsoft has good installation documentation, and Voila you got Linux in Windows.
Nice
Still, I hate some of the annoyance of Windows, but I don’t miss anything big from Linux. It has good support from a lot of dev tools. VS Code runs well, Docker runs well, and more than that Nvidia drivers work well. People who try to install Nvidia drivers on a Linux machine know the pain of installing Nvidia drivers. After using it for over a year I don’t feel like missing Linux.
Linux In Windows kills Linux?
As we all know developers are the ones who use Linux most of the time. I know devs who dual boot their machine with Windows and Linux because they need some apps like PhotoShop to edit images for their websites. Shut it down and boot Linux to get the dev work done and then find out that the image has the wrong dimension. Again shut it down boot Windows and repeat the process an infinite number of times. WSL completely solves this issue. Yes, there might be some performance issue, but I never noticed it.
Also in the latest major update, you can even run some of the Linux GUI applications as well. What more do you need?
Thoughts
In terms of use, I don’t think there are any significant drawbacks to using WSL. What do you guys think?
Top comments (5)
I know hindsight is 20-20, but for other people trying this: if you want a machine to run Linux, you should consider that when choosing the specs.
If your machine uses a bad WiFi chip, then you can always spend $10 and buy a tiny USB wifi dongle, or $30 and buy a replacement WiFi card. I'm guessing prices, but I mean they're insignificant compared to a machine like you're describing.
WSL2 is pretty good. I use it myself on my desktop because I have a gaming PC which does duty as one half of my work setup (I use a pretty terminal and SSH to connect to a real computer, basically). But it doesn't solve everything. There's a lot you can't access in WSL, like device or open ports and so on. Most of the graphical apps you try will look like they came from the '90s or be a pain to configure. A lot won't even run.
Most importantly, using WSL means you're using a bunch of non-free software - Windows, basically - which is two steps back if your reason for using Linux is software freedom in the first place.
So your post's title asks whether WSL is a Linux killer. The simple answer to that specific question is "no". WSL provides an alternative way of running Linux. It isn't replacing Linux. So it is definitely not killing Linux. I do find it very useful, and have it enabled on all of my Windows systems.
I mean, macOS was already a Linux killer right from where OS X was launched. Full POSIX environment based on BSD. But way less time fighting with hardware and configuration problems. Many people made the switch and never came back.
The price tag is higher obviously but in a work environment the company pays for it.
In my opinion the real Linux killer is Linux itself and his disdain for simplicity and usability made impossible by the mantra of bazaar style of development and the "more choices is always better" mantra.
I am always amazed when I want to install a
my-commandthat exists on both Linux and macOS.The installation instructions for 90% of users (macOS) is simply
brew install my-command.The installation instructions for the remaining 10% is: "super long list on how you install it on ubuntu, debian, redhat, pacman, go, from sources, pacman, emerge, funto, conda, ...`
I don't misunderstand the use case for WSL, that's exactly how I use it - what I'm saying is that WSL isn't "a Linux killer" because it doesn't cover a lot of the same ground as a normal distro.
i did not understand it could you please make a blueprint so i can understand easily . What is Vashikaran