Update: I was a complete idiot for thinking WSL2 would even be stable. Not only is it remarkably laggy and slow (I have tons of video evidence of it) but it has several other major drawbacks. In fact, removing it actually corrupted one of my git repos that has some crazy shit going on with the filesystem. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM WSL2!
Update: I overreacted to VPN not working in WSL2. I’ve since decided to use WSL2 as my daily driver because outside of this VPN problem, WSL2 really is the best Linux desktop distro for most working people.
I’ve concluded that further work supporting and researching how to do anything on Windows systems is simply out of scope until the critical flaws are fixed that block Anyconnect VPN from working with WSL2 out of the box.
The workarounds are currently horrible and usually involve hacking in an extra PowerShell script. Others have transformed their laptops into proxy-routers (essentially) and use their own hardware. These “solutions” are not only not complicated and somewhat unnatural but usually supported and against the IT policies of the enterprises that require this broken VPN setup.
Therefore, I will no longer be doing any further research or publishing anything that promotes the use of Windows as a Linux alternative. What good is WSL2 if it cannot be used in most enterprise environments by remote employees required to use VPNs? Until this is resolved officially by a collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco I will do everything in my power to ensure that the warning goes out and that people actively campaign — in every way possible — for this to be fixed. But the issue has been on GitHub for over two years with no hope of resolution in site, so I’m not hopeful.
This is particularly important since Docker Desktop is proprietary and requires organizations over 250 to pay a price per seat to use it. Docker Desktop is the only proven way to use all the standard tools — without modification — and still use Linux on Windows by creating a workspace container (as I have used at work for most of the last year). This has killed any hope of getting a supported Docker solution, that does not cost extra money, working and the reason the company I work for has actively moved away from Windows for their machine learning workstations going with Mac instead. (They are still to unsupportive of Linux on workstations because of how conservative they are.)
Related:
minikube Instead of WSL2 and Docker DesktopTags:
#windows #linux #wsl2 #fails #vpn