If you're already using a Vagrant or Docker-based development workflow, WSL doesn't really add much, and takes some things away. I/O performance, for example.

> If you're already using a Vagrant or Docker-based development workflow, WSL doesn't really add much, and takes some things away. I/O performance, for example.

I've been actively using WSL for over a year along with Docker and set up the Docker CLI in WSL to talk to the Docker for Windows daemon.

Performance in that scenario is no different than running the Docker CLI in PowerShell, or do you just mean I/O performance in general in WSL? In which case once you turn off Windows defender it's very usable. WSL v2 will also apparently make I/O performance 2-20x faster depending on what you're doing.

WSL adds a lot if you're using Docker IMO. Suddenly if you want, you can run tmux and terminal Vim along with ranger while your apps run nice and efficiently in Docker. Before you know it, you're spending almost all of your time on the command line but can still reach into the Windows cookie jar for gaming and other GUI apps that aren't available on Linux and can't be run in a Windows VM.

I find that it depends a lot on what you're doing. The real problem with WSL is I/O latency.

It's acceptable for relatively infrequent file access, but will eat you alive if you're doing anything that involves lots of random file access, or batch processing of large sets of small files, or stuff like that.

I just haven't seen that as a problem in my day to day as a developer working with Flask, Rails, Phoenix and Webpack.

That's dealing with 10k+ line projects spread across dozens of files quite often, and even transforming ~100 small JS / SCSS files through Webpack. It's all really fast even on 5 year old hardware (my source code isn't even on an SSD either).

Fast as in, Webpack CSS recompiles often take 250ms to about 1.5 second depending on how big the project is and all of the web framework code is close to instant to reload on change. Hundreds of Phoenix controller tests run in 3 seconds, etc..

It isn't perfect. The IO performance is currently poor and it doesn't play well with Windows Defender (wastes a lot of CPU). Also, since your IDE would live in Windows, you can sometimes have issues with Windows and Linux both interacting with the same files.