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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Is the Windows Subsystem for Linux worth it? (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago by Resol to c/[email protected]

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I've had a pretty poor experience with it myself, so I wanna see what the Linux community thinks about this.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Been daily driving WSL Debian for about a year on my work laptop, without systemd and display server. At first, I was really only using it for application servers that just won't run or too tedious to run on windows. But windows is just terrible for dev work that's not part of windows eco system. So I found myself slowly moving most of my dev stuff to WSL. There are still some problems though.

Off the top of my head, first is neovim and the system clipboard. I can use clip.exe but there's a problem with unicode characters. It's expecting some UTF-16 encoding or something but my bash is in UTF-8. And somehow that messes up copying some unicode characters. I have to either use iconv to convert the encoding before copying or may be change my bash encoding.

Another recent problem I had is binding WSL ports to the window host's network. WSL automatically binds the service ports to host window's localhost with the same port number, which is pretty useful. But it only binds to localhost address. If you want it to bind to other addresses, you can't configure it. You can to run some kind of a patch program someone wrote, that rebinds WSL ports the wildcard address. And it doesn't work very well if the patch program's version and your WSL's versions are not compatible.

Another minor problem is that there's some kind of a freeze that lasts for about a minute when I'm doing fzf in bash. It happens sporadically. I'm not entirely sure if the problem's with Windows Terminal or WSL. It's likely WSL. It seems to happen with other terminal emulators as well.

All in all, WSL makes having to be on windows a whole lot bearable. I'll probably end up using only rudimentary UI apps on windows and move the rest to WSL.