WSL isn't too bad nowadays. I would go as far as saying it's very good. I've been using it for full time development for over a year now.
I've run 100,000+ line Rails apps in WSL (well technically through Docker, which I connect to through WSL) and I never noticed a slowdown that was bad enough to make me think "this sucks". It's always been pretty good. I run all sorts of Rails, Flask, Phoenix and Webpack driven apps and all of them run fast enough where I don't think twice about it.
Personally, I find the WSL set up somewhat close to native Linux in terms of the user experience. I'm not talking about I/O performance, but I mean how it feels to use the OS in general.
For example:
I spend 99% of my time in a WSL terminal using tmux + terminal Vim + ranger. So that takes care of coding and managing files.
Then I use a browser and other graphical apps (image / video editors) that run directly in Windows.
Dexpot sets up virtual screens with key binds that are comparable to how i3wm lets you switch and move windows to another screen.
Keypirinha lets you launch apps with a fuzzy finder (like dmenu but better IMO)
AutoHotkey lets you easily manage global hotkeys (just like i3 does) and more
When you put all of that together, you get a really really good development experience that also doubles for gaming and running programs that don't have a good alternative on Linux (such as Camtasia on Windows).
Then for the icing on the cake, since you're running Ubuntu 18.04 in WSL, you can provision WSL itself with the same exact configuration management scripts you would use to provision a production box. For me specifically I run all of the same Ansible roles against WSL that I do in production. I can set the whole thing up with 1 Ansible command. Plus my dotfiles also happen to work exactly how they do on my native Linux laptop so it's easy to keep things in sync and feeling the same.
This all runs from a i5 3.2ghz / 16GB of RAM / SSD / etc. $750 desktop built 5 years ago.
Even if Apple tax didn't exist I would still use this Windows / WSL set up if I weren't in a position where I could run Linux natively.
I've run 100,000+ line Rails apps in WSL (well technically through Docker, which I connect to through WSL) and I never noticed a slowdown that was bad enough to make me think "this sucks". It's always been pretty good. I run all sorts of Rails, Flask, Phoenix and Webpack driven apps and all of them run fast enough where I don't think twice about it.
Personally, I find the WSL set up somewhat close to native Linux in terms of the user experience. I'm not talking about I/O performance, but I mean how it feels to use the OS in general.
For example:
I spend 99% of my time in a WSL terminal using tmux + terminal Vim + ranger. So that takes care of coding and managing files.
Then I use a browser and other graphical apps (image / video editors) that run directly in Windows.
Dexpot sets up virtual screens with key binds that are comparable to how i3wm lets you switch and move windows to another screen.
Keypirinha lets you launch apps with a fuzzy finder (like dmenu but better IMO)
AutoHotkey lets you easily manage global hotkeys (just like i3 does) and more
When you put all of that together, you get a really really good development experience that also doubles for gaming and running programs that don't have a good alternative on Linux (such as Camtasia on Windows).
Then for the icing on the cake, since you're running Ubuntu 18.04 in WSL, you can provision WSL itself with the same exact configuration management scripts you would use to provision a production box. For me specifically I run all of the same Ansible roles against WSL that I do in production. I can set the whole thing up with 1 Ansible command. Plus my dotfiles also happen to work exactly how they do on my native Linux laptop so it's easy to keep things in sync and feeling the same.
This all runs from a i5 3.2ghz / 16GB of RAM / SSD / etc. $750 desktop built 5 years ago.
Even if Apple tax didn't exist I would still use this Windows / WSL set up if I weren't in a position where I could run Linux natively.