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Same experience here. I've dabbled with Linux Desktop in the past but always backed out once I encountered the rough edges. Just because everything is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend a couple of hours on each of the 100 paper cuts. It adds up over time and feels never-ending.

But now, I just open Claude Code and say "this is bothering me" and it runs in the background while I complete other tasks. I get it to document anything it changes and push my custom configs into a private git repo along with my dot files.

In some sense, I'm starting to see Linux almost like a Smalltalk image. Anything permanent is backed up to git and I have documented recipes to go from fresh-install to custom environment in a couple of hours.

There are still a lot of rough edges all over the place but it is a totally workable environment.

Anecdata: Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.

Given raw Linux or WSL I'd choose WSL 9 times out of 10.

Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.

My budget Beelink with Windows 11 Pro has been one of the best development workstations I've ever had. Maybe 1 crash in 5 years?

And with WSL, very easy to jump between any linux distro. Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Arch -- anything.

À lot of laptops from that era came with unreliable WiFi chips and there was no recall because of supply chain shortages

> Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021

Unfortunately I have some bad news for you about random device drivers on linux. I guess with AI you can now fix the driver upstream yourself though.

WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.

But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.

I had the opposite experience.

I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.

WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).

The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.

Yeah, WSL was the gateway to daily driving for me. I'd played with Linux as a kid, came back via WSL, and quickly came to the conclusion I'd be best off without Windows.

Haven't regretted it for a second.

Did you work out of /mnt/c?

I did the same, fighting WSL constantly with some other random conflicting stuff. Moved to Ubuntu and honestly things just work. _Maybe_ 2026/27 will finally be the year of linux desktop.

For me Win11 was the final stop.

I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.

After many years of failed switching attempts, I finally made the move to CachyOS 2 months ago. Windows 11 updates constantly force-feeding copilot and not letting me shut down my system without updating is what finally pushed me to give it another honest go.

I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.

Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:

- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.

- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.

- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...

- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)

- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work

- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted

- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.

- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.

- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.

EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.

Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.

Which distro did you switch to?

It's the same thing. Seems like the major version bump is to advertise WSLc, which is like Apple containers - an SDK for launching Linux containers as part of a Windows app.

Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software

Is it accurate to call this WSL3? WSL 2 was released in 2019, but WSL 2.0.0 was released in 2023 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.0.0

That is quite relevant, and compose ability is on the way, or for some workloads Aspire would be an alternative I guess.

Unfortunately most companies are too cheap to pay for Docker Desktop, and having Windows containers depend on a third party tool has been a problem in such customers.

Because using Rancher Desktop or Podman isn't also a given, due to similar issues.

great to hear it thanks. I stumbled upon it on that HN article on containers, and since I’ve run doing other WSL benchmarks lately (testing kernel mitigations , which have a huge performance impact on the guest container), I re-ran those benchmarks on the upgrade.

I love Linux and use it for everything except my desktop for 20+ years now. Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing. Last time (6mo ago) it was my sound card. Small little annoyances that steal hours of productivity. LTS was going good until I wanted to update to the next LTS then the can of worms gets opened. It’s fantastic when it’s fresh and everything works and you can blow it away easily and reinstall. I’ve never found upgrading packages to be reliable long term without eventually having to do some manually recovery or reinstall OS

Especially given 1 -> 2 was a complete rewrite that changed the entire architecture to the extent that there are still reasons to run WSL 1 in some cases. Talking of which, the one thing I'd be excited about (if I ever expected to do any dev on Windows again, which I don't) would be a way of sharing local storage between Windows and Linux processes without incurring a massive slowdown on one side, which WSL 1 achieves, but it doesn't sound like this has that. (Or does it?)

I think MS is calling it Wsl2 still (3.x series) . Let’s see if they shift the naming like MacOS did with the numbering. (It was 10.x for the longest time then they ditched it)

You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c. A lot of people make this mistake and then complain that WSL is slow. On the native linux file system WSL is 100x faster for everything

There is virtio support now, and to be fair 9P was never an issue for me.

That feature is faster as well (using virtiofs instead of 9p), but i use the native VHDX IO for my work, which is adequately fast.

And yet I had results perfectly within the range of "good enough" having an ai harness muck about in a work folder in a docker mount on a 9P mapped drive under permanent observation by an intelliJ instance on the Windows side before some buggy Windows update made it occasionally lock up under `npm i` sized filesystem loads. Crazy how far we've come.

WSL3 is the app version. The underlying mechanism of how Windows runs Linux hasn't changed. The change from WSL to WSL2 was in that mechanism (WSL: run via syscall translation, WSL2: run via VM). This is an app change, so it covers the interfaces of how you can start running Linux code, but underneath the hood, it's still a kernel running within a VM.

The big addition here is the support for containers. The app now provides a simple way to run containers directly. Underneath the hood, there's still a kernel running on a VM, though. There's also some improvements to the filesystem layer, a kernel upgrade, etc.

This article[0] does a nice job explaining it.

[0] https://zenn.dev/yohakucode/articles/wsl3-wsl2-wslc-update

I had to speculate using the changelog, since MS hasn’t released performance tests . Kernel 6.18 has a better scheduler and other refinements. WSL3 improved the clock routines to use a synthetic clock. There are quite a few others.

virtiofs is the biggest change, it was experimental in 2.x. It doesn’t affect my application, but most new users who want to share files between windows + Linux will see a huge bump.

I've never enjoyed Linux desktop. I love Linux command line tools. WSL is the best of both worlds for me.

Nowadays I use it mostly for Linux containers.

Well, you can use linux-tools on windows too. I kind of compiled most of LFS/BLFS on it, and it works. So it just gives you more options.

I’ve never been good at marketing. And that was tongue tying

> If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.

Good trick: get rid of the superfluous Windows layer which stands between that expensive hardware and your target OS. It takes up valuable memory, CPU time and storage space, introduces latency where you don't want it, exfiltrates data to unknown destinations and can decide to "upgrade" itself without warning.

Good tricks need catchy names to succeed so how about NoSL?

Do you run your workloads on Windows partitions/filesystem but using WSL2 as the runner? That's how you end up with abysmal performance.

We tested this in the office with equal laptops. CPU workloads have almost no VM overhead and the C++ / Rust compilation workloads on purely WSL2 virtual disk image is only 2% slower.

Yes WSL1 was more ambitious but the fundamental differences in the NT and POSIX makes it quite hard and CPU workloads suffered.

MS Office is notoriously resistant to running in Wine (haven't tried it myself) and, with all love to LubreOffuce, it's clearly the poor relation.

I've usually been able to get windows software running, but it's not always easy. I borrow my wife's laptop to reprogram my gaming mouse, for example. Couldn't be bothered any longer to dick about with wine.

But this is slightly beside the point: many have to use the allotted machines at work, which will tend to be windows (or maybe mac). That's the audience for WSL. It is an escape hatch for wage slaves.

The original WSL translated syscalls. It was a very tight integration. It was not perfect, and i should think it was a massive ongoing effort. I think it's an elegant approach bit i can see why wsl2 is essentially a vm. I never did any benchmarking, but i suspect that what wsl2 loses in disk performance, it gains in kernel performance. I never found either variant slow, and my corporate laptop was shit. My vagrant stack was diabolically slow, though.

I have no problem with WSL2 being a VM of sorts if thet at least had VirtualBox of 2010 vintage features like properly integrating USB devices, not whatever this usbipd crap is, or a window manager that doesn’t inexplicably die and require a full machine restart.

You need to start Claude in WSL, not from outside in Windows. Windows user has complete ownership over the WSL it launches

Many industries are sadly coupled to Windows, for years to come. There's no getting rid of a lot of legacy software/code. Oddly enough, Microsoft has rolled back their forced Copilot, in a rare step in the right direction.

... does it lag on the shell or does it lag when you are in some vibecoded "TUI" njs monstrosity? Because if the latter, the issue is probably not cause of wsl...

seems like a self-imposed constraint.

> Most people there would want a Mac given the choice

I don't think so. A PC with Linux is always the right choice. Macs don't even give you the option of a tower with a dedicated GPU, they are pathetic nowadays.

Win11 adds crapware; it also makes some of that crapware difficult to remove.

But once that crapware is exorcised, Windows can be useful.

Typescript, vscode, LSP, powershell, kernel subsystems, the HAL, C#, F#, DirectX, side-by-side libraries, a VMM that fucking works. Exchange, SQL Server. Great hardware.

It's a crappy company, like all corporate giants. It has a lot of crappy products. But the case is usually overstated.

Even going back 10 some good ones

* Windows Terminal

* Powershell 7

* Including OpenSSH client + server with windows

* the Visual Studio command line build toolset distribution

* Hyper V and bundling it with Windows Pro

* RDP

* MS Edge (basing on chromium, same extensions, same dev platform)

-1, Flamebait

Unfortunately that acquisition option isn't available in most physical stores, where normies buy their computers, even though there isn't a single OEM not running some distro on their data centers.

There’s always going to be a tradeoff with usability. Even on Linux you’ll run containers or VMs to prepare your developer environment (servers aren’t running Arch).

You’d be impressed by how fast WSL runs. I’ve got other optimizations on the blog for even more performance tuning with pretty massive 2x-5x gains.

Links to benchmarks?

As someone develops for both systems, I would argue doing the opposite is better from the OS design perspective. NT has a much better paradigm than Linux or any POSIX-system. We should move away from POSIX in the age of AIs. The OS should be more granular in its permission handling to its core. NT can do this. Linux requires a complete rethinking and rewrite to have this in the syscall layer. Current extensions like SELinux are hacks. Something like seL4 should be the basis of future OSes. NT is simply closer to that.