In a recent episode the team was talking about WSL and Linux and when it makes sense. Here’s my case scenario:

I work for a very large retailer with a large IT department and mature practices… especially about what machines and operating systems they issue. Linux machines aren’t on the list. Macs and PCs are.

For the Mac based people having access to a good terminal is no problem. I’ve introduced them to Warp (thank you Mike—I got all kinds of street cred for that one—pays to listen to this show)

For the PC folks things are a bit more challenging. We had a scenario where two of our engineers were unable to run the scripts they needed to, because they didn’t have some of the tools native to Linux/Mac. So they installed WSL and after a quick restart and a quick apt-get… they were up and running.

This was super efficient! We didn’t have to request a Linux box from IT and wait for the ticket to get solved. We didn’t have to wait for a Linux VM to get spun up. Microsoft’s technique for enabling Linux fit perfectly within our enterprise solutions and allowed us to quickly meet our needs without triggering any of the security configs on the machine.

From my experience WSL has a space and makes our workflow a lot more efficient.