Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 26 posts

Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#1

Post by Karsteski »

Hi, I've finally gotten a software developer job! I've changed careers from being a chemist, which was really draining me.

Anyways, I've been doing pretty much all my coding on Linux (Ubuntu -> Pop_OS! -> Fedora), but I run Windows 10 on another SSD as I game as well, and Linux is just no where near a quality user experience for gaming, at least the kind of games I play. Note I also have an NVIDIA GPU lol...

I'd like to not have to constantly switch OSes, so I was thinking to use WSL2 to install Fedora w/ no GUI, and just do all my dev stuff through the command line, which I've gotten more familiar with lately. I do my editing using Neovim already, so that should be fine.

Has anyone on HN done something similar, and what has been your experience? Once I get a laptop in a few months to a year (hopefully a Framework laptop!), I'll use Fedora on there as well.

There's also a part of me that very much dislikes contributing to Microsoft's push to pull Linux users over, but at the end of the day I just need to get shit done :|

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#2

Post by rbanffy »

I think there is a Fedora install available on the Microsoft store, but it is paid for and I’m not sure the proceeds will go to the Fedora maintainers.

I don’t like WSL much. It feels like a second class environment, where the Linux filesystem is accessible via a network share.

In any case, it works. Windows Terminal is good enough, but I find Windows a hopelessly confusing OS with lots of places where it seems unfinished.

Considered all its pain points, I’d go with a VM under VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. You’ll get a desktop-like experience if you go full screen and you still can get to the filesystem via the VM’s host drive plumbing. And nothing prevents you from running Windows Terminal and ssh’ing into the proper VM.

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#4

Post by anaisbetts »

It works great, especially with Windows 11 where you can run X11/Wayland apps perfectly. Fedora isn't packaged for WSL2 at the moment but https://fedoramagazine.org/wsl-fedora-33 is a good way to do it - I use Arch Linux via this method and it works great.

The only difference between this article and today, instead of using that Powershell command to set your default user on login, use /etc/wsl.conf (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#user...)

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#5

Post by justinclift »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I think there is a Fedora install available on the Microsoft store, but it is paid for and I’m not sure the proceeds will go to the Fedora maintainers. I don’t like WSL much. It feels like a second class environment, where the Linux filesystem is accessible via a network share. In any case, it works. Windows Terminal is good enough, but I find Windows a hopelessly confusing OS with lots of places where it seems unfin…

Yeah, using Linux full screen in VMware Workstation is generally pretty good, and hard to tell there's a windows layer underneath most of the time.

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#6

Post by Karsteski »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I think there is a Fedora install available on the Microsoft store, but it is paid for and I’m not sure the proceeds will go to the Fedora maintainers. I don’t like WSL much. It feels like a second class environment, where the Linux filesystem is accessible via a network share. In any case, it works. Windows Terminal is good enough, but I find Windows a hopelessly confusing OS with lots of places where it seems unfin…

Is there a way for me to run my current Fedora install as a VM in Windows? Basically I just want the simplest solution, which I guess is for me to ssh into my eventual Linux laptop. But since I don't know when I'll be getting that, I'm wondering what are the pain points of using Fedora through VMWare Workstation. I used VirtualBox when I was first trying out Ubuntu, and it felt noticeably less smooth. Note my main monitor is 1440p 165Hz, so I don't know if that affected things.

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#7

Post by burmanm »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I think there is a Fedora install available on the Microsoft store, but it is paid for and I’m not sure the proceeds will go to the Fedora maintainers. I don’t like WSL much. It feels like a second class environment, where the Linux filesystem is accessible via a network share. In any case, it works. Windows Terminal is good enough, but I find Windows a hopelessly confusing OS with lots of places where it seems unfin…

These are my solutions also, I do have a working Fedora in WSL2 (using the manual method of installation), but I still keep using the VMware Workstation. At this point, although the GUI is running, I'm only using it as a "remote ssh" from my VSCode and everything works like a charm.

Certainly WSL2 integration has some benefits, but I'm not really using any of them at this point. My Windows terminal sshs to the Linux VM, my VSCode terminal opens in the Linux VM and everything feels fine. That covers my development requirements pretty well and rest of the stuff I do with native Windows tools (and I rarely need to cross-access files).

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#8

Post by Karsteski »

anaisbetts wrote: post #4

It works great, especially with Windows 11 where you can run X11/Wayland apps perfectly. Fedora isn't packaged for WSL2 at the moment but https://fedoramagazine.org/wsl-fedora-33 is a good way to do it - I use Arch Linux via this method and it works great. The only difference between this article and today, instead of using that Powershell command to set your default user on login, use /etc/wsl.conf ( https://docs.mi…

Do you know the disadvantage between W10 and W11 wrt. GUI apps through WSL2? What problems would I run into? I'd really rather not upgrade to W11, given all the fuckery Microsoft seems to be doing... I'd prefer to stick to W10 and hopefully in a few years I can just use Linux full-time.

Re: Switching to WSL2 with Fedora over plain Fedora install for development?

#10

Post by mhitza »

You can also try to run Windows in a VM and do GPU passthrough (assuming you also have an integrated graphics card aside from the NVIDIA GPU). Last I've heard it's rather easy to do nowadays, back in 2017 when I tried that it was quite finicky.
Post reply on HN