Thoughts on WSL 2

So a few weeks ago Microsoft released the May 2020 update for windows 10. Normally this would pass me by, but this update contained a big update in the way the Windows Subsystem for Linux works.

I use WSL/Ubuntu along with the windows terminal pretty much everyday, and I flipping love it, having the Linux tools on my windows machine is amazing and so useful as a developer. The only issue I have ever really had was the speed, its not that bad, but it could be better 🐢

So, this release was supposed to increase the speed 5 fold or something, so I though great, pulled the update down and updated my Ubuntu install to a WSL2 version.

After everything had finished updating, i fired up the terminal did a git pull in the terminal, did a bit of work then did a git status. And i waited, and waited. It came back, but it was noticeably slower than it was before the update. So I tried another repo. Same again.

Now, all of my code is held in the Windows side of my machine, as I work in visual Studio and VSCode for my development. As a test i created a new repo on the Linux file system, then opened it up in VSCode via the command line, made some changes and did a git status. It was pretty speedy, I did a commit, made some more changes/added files etc and it was still fast, like really fast. I went back to my original repo and tried the same but it was slower again.

So, I've come to the conclusion that WSL2 is only faster if you do you work on the Linix side exclusively, people like me who still open their stuff up from windows and just use the command line tools don't seem to have been helped (quite the opposite in fact) by this release.  It's not the end of the world and i'll be carrying on using it everyday, its just a little disappointing its no faster 😟