WSL
Running Linux and Docker natively on a Windows machine, Daily development work replacing Linux virtual machines
It provides a seamless Linux environment for development on Windows, but requires occasional maintenance for disk space and lacks full hardware access.
Tasks requiring direct hardware pass-through, Long-term use without manual disk space management
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FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“run it in WSL which does reasonably well for all the files I really care about”
MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“crashing my WSL hard and even corrupting files on the virtual drive attached to WSL in a very strange manner that made recent files just disappear”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-07-02
“I run models on WSL and my desktop reliably wakes up from sleep. Best of both worlds.”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-07-02
“If they coded their windows side better so I can do things in wsl and powershell to see and interact with .jpg/.heic files in icloud photos, an awful lot of my pain would go away”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-24
“connecting to VPN while it's running breaks the networking inside WSL”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“WSL was the closest I got to an "it just works" dev environment”
MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-11
“The thing that I don't like of the WSL2 is that is just a VM, but a VM that is very limited”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-10
“using WSL native ability to access the host NTFS system is very very slow”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-08
“sometimes in WSL, which sometimes crashes for no reason when I copy a lot of data around and somehow reverts contents of a mounted vhd virtual drive to previous state from long ago, after a crash”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“takes ages on my Windows machine, whether it is through WSL, Docker or direct, largely in part due to corporate filters, checks, anti-virus and malware protectors and endpoint control”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“WSL1's file performance is pretty much as good as it gets on Windows”
MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“Windows accessing a mounted EXT4 volume through WSL is much faster than the other way around.”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“the shell for WSL2 runs in a window that grabs things, such as ^V. So, ssh from WSL2 (to AWS for example) is awkward.”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“WSL is great. I like it. I enjoy & prefer Windows desktop & Linux terminal. very happy.”
POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago”
NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“if you try running Next js from files on Windows from WSL it takes minutes for each page to compile to the point that any local development is impossible”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“WSL file speeds, especially when running npm install, were the impetus that ultimately got me to switch off of Windows.”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-05
“WSL is a better *nix dev env than macOS, at least its real Linux”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-04
“Much better IME, especially if you keep all development inside the wsl vm”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-04
“WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux”
MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-02
“you probably want to do all of the installation inside of WSL, just so that file paths are the *nix variety”
POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-30
“WSL only hands Windows images to the Linux side in an old BMP format Claude Code can't read; (2) WSL also keeps quietly overwriting your fixes a moment later”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-25
“Had me running the AMD card on windows under WSL (not a problem with nvidia though, that ran just fine on windows-side directly)”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-22
“Doesn't have a straightforward linux/wsl install (I ended up using the Windows IDE and pointing it to wsl)”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-21
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