[womod]

WSL2 is for the most part totally usable for everyday development, but it does have a handful of issues that either need workarounds or are just infeasible.

USB passthrough isn't yet supported, so it's necessary to make use of something like VirtualHere[1] or some another TCPIP tunneling daemon running on the windows depending on what you're trying to do.

There seems to sometimes be issues with resuming from S0ix sleep where the VM process is still "running" but it gets stuck in a state where new processes just will not spawn. It's been a while since I messed with it, but my "solution" was disabling a VM security measure, launching Process Hacker 2 as admin, searching for "lxss" in the process list and terminating the corresponding svchost.

The actual linux kernel running inside WSL2 is interesting, it's microsofts own custom kernel[2] with some magic sauce for making everything play nice. Unfortunately, it (still?) lacks a fully-functional SystemD so making some programs work can be a chore. Also all the kernel modules compiled in, and it doesn't allow loading them dynamically with modprobe. There are some alternative kernels out there that solve some of these issues, though I haven't bothered to try any since whenever I run into these sorts of issues it's less of a hassle to just switch to a dedicated linux box.

For all of the issues that come with Windows 11, having WSLg make running graphical programs "just work" out of the box with rock-solid copy/paste, alt+tab, etc., really makes it a joy to work with.

[1] - https://www.virtualhere.com/

[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

[xnyan]

Native support for systemd was added in september. Still waiting on real USB passthrough, it’s the last thing on my list that keeps WSL2 from being my main development environment.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i...