I’m about to do something slightly risky and install the “release preview” build of Windows 10 V2004. It’s a very calculated risk, though– I still have my ~9-year-old laptop running Debian Linux if things go completely haywire. Why am I taking this particular risk? I’m pretty reliant on WSL for a lot of what I do these days; most of my softlist flow uses scripting for Bash with substantial additional use of wget, lftp, and ROMVault.

Performance on WSL1 has been a sore point of the process. In particular, filesystem access speeds on WSL1 are terrible– but that’s equally the fault of WSL and the absolutely undeniable fact that Windows 10 has abysmal read/write speeds in general. WSL2 allows me to use a native Linux filesystem (in this case, it most certainly will end up being EXT4) and that will help the chugging issue.

I hope I don’t have to reinstall Windows after this is over with, but if I do it won’t be a completely horrible situation at least.

We’ll see how well this comes out.

— Firehawke