Unleashing WSL2 as the Ultimate Dev Environment

I was ready to jump to Mac for good until Microsoft added WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). WSL2 is a better and faster version, but it always lacked the killer feature I wanted - to run VMs in any flavor or version of Linux on demand. Devs can learn so much from having their own fast local dev environment that they aren't afraid to break and own completely themselves.

Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ Gateway both have native WSL support baked in, so the DX is amazing - your laptop likely has SSD and the ability to have a shared filesystem with the host OS is a great help.

Enter DistroD, a program that sews up a bunch of upstream projects to give you the killer command line you want. It is currently somewhat busted but there is a workaround until it can be fixed. I recommend using the -n flag so that you can name your VM something logical because it defaults to "distroD" which isn't a great name. I typically do -n "Rocky9" for example.

Microsoft Terminal has also gotten much better and integrates with your WSL-powered VMs automatically. The WSL performance smokes Gitbash or CMD on the Windows OS. Try this out and say goodbye to C:\ forever!