WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux. If I were in charge there would be a team devoted to fixing this a decade ago.

WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always been hacks around this, but for many devs the easiest hack was to ditch Windows.

They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse. Linux is open source.

Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.

What killed WSL for me was the incredibly janky way I had to share USB peripherals. usb-ipd works 80% of the time, all the time.

I had no idea they used the Plan 9 file server for accessing files in WSL. I wonder what the original reasoning for choosing 9P was.

Moved to mac about 7 years ago because of horrible WSL file system speed was.

If it is as good of an improvement as the first major update, it will be hard to tell from native.

Hopefully, they will just push it out to everyone asap. We make heavy use of symlinks into Windows drives.

They are undoubtly doing this because so many users operate out of /mnt/c with zero clue of that implication.

I can’t find any benchmarks on this, anyone have a sense of the speedup that can be expected here?

And for what it’s worth, that version isn’t available yet when I try to update WSL.

I was trying WSL years ago and this is one of the reasons I just moved to a full linux server instead. We still have way too many problems interfacing across filesystems. I hope with AI we will see an iteration on ExFAT that has all the journalling, versioning etc. magic of modern FS' and can be adopted across all 3 OSes. Probably a long shot but I can dream :)

Do the audio buffers to the host device next!

Hasn’t this always been the case? I have always run builds under WSL2 in Windows because of this.

Where are we on the embrace/extend/extinguish curve right about now?

Hopefully they're heading towards a "boot to Linux" mode.

counterpoint: WSL is great. I like it. I enjoy & prefer Windows desktop & Linux terminal. very happy.