My experience with Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL2) as a web developer

Most of us have been in that situation whereby dual-booting is the only option to play our favourite games on windows and do work on Linux. In my case, I was switching from mac to windows and I love the Unix environment and I needed a similar experience. Started doing research and discovered WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) so I will be talking about my experience in this article.

The Good Stuff

I do web development so my day to day workflow would be; installing dependencies. jumping through different codebases, unit testing and sometimes integration testing. for all these, it's so fast you could forget you're coding in another operating system entirely, I also loved how well it integrates with vscode as well. I even can install cool terminal shells like zshell (zsh), this takes the terminal to the next level by adding auto-complete, syntax highlighting, vim, icons and other cool stuff you couldn't have in your windows terminal.

The weird Stuff

The only drawback i was able to point out was how was performance when running multiple instances of Nodejs apps and cypress GUI with chrome. This used a lot of ram (up to 3gb) on my machine. it didn't affect much system's performance on my 16gb machine but would be a problem on machines with lower specifications.

Verdict

I highly recommend it for software development on windows especially if you do a lot of work on the terminal. If you work in security, backend, DevOps and most parts of software development but you still want access to your favourite Windows apps while working on a secure Linux distro, Go ahead and give it a try. you might just love it.

Thanks for reading!🧀