A while back I made it a goal to use Linux as the OS for my daily driver, primarily due to concerns over telemetry in Windows 10. I was able to stick with that through 2019 and the first part of 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it challenging to stick with Linux, as I found myself having to use more unsupported software and hardware.
I switched back to using Windows 10, and to my surprise I've found myself enjoying it quite more than expected. A large part of that is due to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and the new Windows Terminal, which in conjunction with VS Code has made for a pretty streamlined software development toolset.
For most of this time, I was working with the legacy WSL system, but just recently I upgraded to WSL 2. I'm incredibly glad that I did; the performance gains were immediately noticeable when working within the Linux filesystem.
To measure this, I conducted a little unscientific experiment using the test suite from my Advent of Code project. After 10 trials on the legacy WSL system, I found that the tests took roughly 107.278 seconds to execute. With the same machine, sample size, and code, I was able to cut that down to 67.034 seconds by using WSL 2. That's a ~37.5% speed increase for free!
It's not that often that you can get that kind of boost without either new hardware, a lot of effort, or both. While I found the architecture of the legacy WSL more novel (the second edition is basically a fine-tuned VM), you can't argue with results. So if you're using Windows, willingly or reluctantly, give WSL 2 a shot - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
~ MAD