Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "I Coded with WSL2 for a Week" video.

@Digger-Nick It’s the other way round. WSL2 is the first step towards getting rid of the Windows kernel. Unless you’re talking about WSL1, in which case ... I pity you.
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Is anybody still using Windows for serious work? Other than games?
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@johnwellbelove148 None of which is relevant to the issue of IDEs and compilers that you initially raised. Whatever you are developing for, Linux is a more versatile development platform than Windows. And this scares Microsoft, which is why it is putting so much effort into WSL.
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I think eventually Microsoft will decide that maintaining the Windows kernel, with all its decades of accumulated cruft and vulnerabilities, is too much trouble. Then it will simply move the Windows userland on top of the Linux kernel. If you think the Windows kernel is fine, consider why WSL1 had to be abandoned: it was because Windows simply lacked the necessary core functionality to provide Linux-style features.
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@edism “Hasn’t been abandoned” ... yeah, right. Never worked properly, and will never be fixed. But fine, go ahead and drink more of their marketing Kool-Aid™.
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@edism What I don’t understand is why you feel the need to rush to the defence of a dead product -- one that even Microsoft itself can’t be bothered with any more.
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@johnwellbelove148 I’m sure that’s true -- up to a point. There’s a reason why Microsoft feels the need to respond to developers deserting their platform -- because they are, after all, deserting the platform. Even in the embedded space, look at Android, the Raspberry π, Arduino, all the rest of it. The developer tools just work best on Linux. I was helping a client with a Sierra Wireless box the other day. That actually runs an embedded Linux stack. And there are some interesting quirks with the Windows drivers. But on Linux, you don’t actually need custom drivers.
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@johnwellbelove148 Well, Linux is already considered good enough to deploy a hundred million kilometres away on Mars, where support calls are a little bit more difficult than your particular line of work, so the seabed can’t be that far away.
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@johnwellbelove148 You keep thinking in terms of a proprietary OS where all the possible customizations are controlled by the vendor. Linux isn’t like that. You can build it and tune it to suit yourself. Think of how the Ingenuity helicopter was only supposed to last a month on Mars; but by remotely making various tweaks to it, they have kept it flying into the summer months when the air is warmer, and expected to be too thin for the original flying parameters. Also, just to be clear, we need to distinguish between Linux as the development platform, and Linux as the deployment platform. Even where you need some specialist microcontroller setup in your embedded device, Linux can still offer the most versatile development and testing environment. Windows users tend to be conditioned to be allergic to the command line, even when writing custom scripts can save you a great deal of repetitive effort. So the automation facilities on Windows will never be as advanced as those on Linux.
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@Hunsenbargen Sure, lots of companies are too closely tied into their legacy systems. They end up falling into the sunk-cost fallacy. In a competitive marketplace, who wins out: the ones who treat their computing resource as a strategic investment, or those who see it just as an ongoing expense?
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