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?