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I find it to be incredibly janky. Pretty much every every time my computer sleeps (so every morning, at least) I have to restart it because somehow the VM-host networking gets screwed up and VS code connections into the VM stop working. You also can't just put things in your Windows User directory because the filesystem driver is so slow that git commands will take multiple seconds, so now you have two home directories to keep track of. There were also some extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken. IIRC time would also not match the host after a sleep and get extremely far out of sync, though I haven't run into that for a while since now I have to reboot Windows constantly anyway.

I don't have a need to run multiple OSes though. All of my tools are Linux based, and in companies that don't let people run Linux, the actual tools of the trade are almost all in a Linux VM because it's the only reasonable way to use them, and everything else is cross-platform. The outer OS just creates needless issues so that you now need to be a power user with two operating systems and their weird interactions.



> somehow the VM-host networking gets screwed up

> extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken

Are you sure you set up the VPN properly? Messing around with Linux configs is a good way to end up with "somehow" bugs like that.


I don't know how it's set up. That's kind of my point though. I have to now be an expert in Linux and Windows to debug this stuff, which is a waste of my time as someone who's job it is to develop (server, i.e. Linux) software. I had exactly zero issues when I was using Fedora. At one point my company made all of the Linux users move off (we do now have an IT-supported Linux image, but I haven't found the time to re-set up my laptop and don't fully trust that it will work without a bunch of trouble/IT back-and-forth because they also made Windows users start using passkeys), and since then I've seen way more issues with Windows than Linux (e.g. one day my start menu just stopped reacting to me clicking on programs), in addition to things like ads in the lock screen and popups for some XBox pass thing that I had to turn off, which is just insane in a "professional" OS. A lot of days I end up having to hold down the power button to reboot because it just locks up entirely.

OSX was a bit janky with docker filesystem slowness, homebrew being the generally recommended package manager despite being awful (why do I sometimes tap a cask and sometimes pour a bottle? Don't tell me; I don't care. Just make it be "install". Also, don't take "install" as a cue to go update all of my other programs with incompatible versions without asking), annoying 1+ second animations that you can't turn off that make it so the only reasonable way to use your computer is to never maximize a window (with no tiling support of course), and completely broken external monitor support (text is completely illegible IIRC), but Windows takes jank to another level.

By contrast, I never encounter the issues people complain about on Linux. Bluetooth works fine. Wifi works fine. nVidia GPUs and games work fine. Containers are easy to use because they're natively part of the OS. I prefer Linux exactly because I stopped enjoying "tinkering" with my computer like 10 years ago, and I want it to just quietly work without drawing attention to itself (and because Windows 8 and the flat themes that followed were hideous and I was never going to downgrade to that from Windows 7).


Thats odd. I have none of these problems. Sleep doesnt interrupt the VM. And I regularly use the git CLI through WSL on projects living within windows user directories. Both work fine.


FWIW, you can run a VPN (e.g. tailscale) in WSL2. I have WSL2 start up on boot and I can remotely ssh to WSL2 without logging into Windows at all.

I also have tailscale running on Windows itself and they don't conflict.




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