alt Hacker NewsI jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.
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I had the opposite experience.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.
WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).
The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.
Yeah, WSL was the gateway to daily driving for me. I'd played with Linux as a kid, came back via WSL, and quickly came to the conclusion I'd be best off without Windows.
Haven't regretted it for a second.
I did the same, fighting WSL constantly with some other random conflicting stuff. Moved to Ubuntu and honestly things just work. _Maybe_ 2026/27 will finally be the year of linux desktop.
For me Win11 was the final stop.
I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.
WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.