Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By : Stuart Leeks
Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By: Stuart Leeks

Overview of this book

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run native Linux tools alongside traditional Windows applications. Whether you’re developing applications across multiple operating systems or looking to add more tools to your Windows environment, WSL offers endless possibilities. You’ll start by understanding what WSL is and learn how to install and configure WSL along with different Linux distros. Next, you'll learn techniques that allow you to work across both Windows and Linux environments. You’ll discover how to install and customize the new Windows Terminal. We'll also show you how to work with code in WSL using Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In addition to this, you’ll explore how to work with containers with Docker and Kubernetes, and how to containerize a development environment using VS Code. While Microsoft has announced support for GPU and GUI applications in an upcoming release of WSL, at the time of writing these features are either not available or only in early preview releases. This book focuses on the stable, released features of WSL and giving you a solid understanding of the amazing techniques that you can use with WSL today. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to configure WSL and Windows Terminal to suit your preferences, and productively use Visual Studio Code for developing applications with WSL.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction, Installation, and Configuration
5
Section 2:Windows and Linux – A Winning Combination
11
Section 3: Developing with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

In this chapter, you will learn some of the use cases for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and start to get an idea of what WSL actually is, and how it compares to just running a Linux virtual machine. This will aid us in our understanding of the rest of the book, where we will learn all about WSL and how to install and configure it, as well as picking up tips for getting the most from it for your developer workflows.

With WSL, you can run Linux utilities on Windows to help get your work done. You can build Linux applications using native Linux tooling such as debuggers, opening up a world of projects that only have Linux-based build systems. Many of these projects also produce Windows binaries as an output but are otherwise hard for Windows developers to access and contribute to. But because WSL gives you the combined power of Windows and Linux, you can do all of this and still use your favorite Windows utilities as part of your flow.

This book focuses on version 2 of WSL, which is a major reworking of the feature and this chapter will give you an overview of how this version works as well as how it compares to version 1.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in particular:

  • What is WSL?
  • Exploring the differences between WSL 1 and 2

So, let's begin by defining WSL!