After more than two years running WSL (Windows System Linux) on my laptop I’ve finally upgraded to the new version. Honestly, the old version was working just fine for me. My understanding is the new version’s primary benefit lies in performance increases and I think better Docker support.
My experience with Docker has been… awkward, to say the least. I’m in no hurry to go that route if I can possible avoid it, so that’s not why I’ve upgraded. And the sites I work on are quite efficient, so performance on my dev laptop is not a big issue.
I decided to play around with Shopware a bit and ran into problems trying to get it working under WSL1. Those problems may have nothing to do with WSL1 but it seemed possible, and I kind of thought that there’d be performance issues anyways, so here we go.
I’d been leery of this update because my current dev setup relies on it, and I didn’t want to have to go down some rabbit hole to get back to square one if things went wrong. Well, it went quite smoothly! I followed the instructions here and had only one pretty minor hickup.
It went like a charm until I decided that I’d like to mount my project directory into the new Ubuntu “server” I’d set up. Turns out you don’t get the “mount” option unless you’re part of the windows “insiders” program or somesuch. Oh well, the only reason I wanted to use WSL2 was to install Shopware, which doesn’t require mounting my old projects directory so no worries!
Also, you can quite easily switch between WSL1 and WSL2 – so I can just “switch on” whichever one I need for the work that needs doing. Cool!
Now to install Shopware, which is a whole other project.