linuxmemes

This is kind of not really related, but last week, we've been onboarding two new devs into our programming project at work. Our team so far had exclusively used native Linux, while the two new folks were on Windows.

We recommended using a VM, because we had a recollection of how much pain programming on Windows was. Unfortunately, VirtualBox had performance problems on their machines and ordering a VMWare installation took a few days.

So, we spent those few days to see, if Windows was really still that much of a pain. They'd still need a VM for testing, but otherwise, our entire tooling should have been fine on Windows.

Fuck me, those days were wasted. One of our dependencies dynamically pulled in C code and compiled it, which you barely even noticed on Linux, but is apparently not a thing it can do on native Windows.
So, instead they were on WSL pretty early on, but that had all kinds of differences to a native Linux installation and they constantly had to fix the DNS config, because it kept being reset by Windows. In particular, while compiling Rust & C worked, it was extremely slow.

Eventually, they got VMWare and we started setting up the OS. We literally completed installing Linux before a compilation run had finished. And what had cost us multiple days to try to get going under Windows, was just working within an hour on Linux. And for some reason, compilation within the VM was about 20 times faster than under WSL.

I still assume, these are generally solvable problems and if our team had worked under WSL from the start, we would have had some of those solved.
But even taking that into account, there were just so many nonsense problems, which we never had to fix on Linux, that I'm still left absolutely baffled that some people genuinely use WSL for development.