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Ubuntu is growing faster on Windows 11 than on native Linux PCs, says Canonical
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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I absolutely loathe WSL at work. Users with local non-AD connected systems (which bypass GPOs) install it, then start making highly insecure configurations that result in PII nightmares.
It's a goddamned cancer riddled bastard child of Linux and Windows that needs the Ol' Yeller treatment.
Found your problem. Nothing to do with Linux/WSL.
FTFY
I'm guilty of using WSL to bypass what the IT department has done, but that's partly due to our IT department being borderline useless. To prove my point to them one time, I took a project and compiled it in Windows normally, in a fresh Windows VM, and in WSL. A 20 second compile in WSL took 2 minutes on the Windows host.
I don't have admin rights at work so can't install WSL.
But for whatever reason, Virtualbox is something I'm allowed to install. So I did. Now I just use Debian for everything via Virtualbox, IT dept be damned
Windows is only 6x slower in your environment?
Consider yourself lucky.
There are times when my computer just stops, entirely, for like 15 seconds at a time. Didn't ask it to do much...just open Teams.
And I know it's 15 seconds because I have seconds enabled in my clock and it actually stops ticking.
But I'm dailying an Ubuntu laptop at work now, and legit everything is faster. I mean like every day stuff like launching apps and switching windows and browsing webpages. Just an overall far more productive system.
All those delays add up. Especially when mated with an ADHD-riddled admin like me who gets distracted and either moves into another task because Word is taking too long to open (excess context switching makes me anxious...but so does waiting for shit like word to open)...or start investigating it.
Which is a whole other pain point in itself because shit like launching Event Viewer takes a solid 2 minutes. RSOP takes like 10 minutes to compile.
It used to take ADUC 5 minutes to load before I found out that was DNS. Yeah, that was actually DNS.
You asked Cancer to give you Herpes...
The cognitive friction of a slow PC is like sandpaper to my brain
similar but lesser case at work… I was given some 50 K records to analyze, I needed to perform some matches and the records came in flat csv files
I was told by IT that excel was my only option… after 4 hours of it crashing I gave up and did it all on WSL CLI commads, it took less than 45 seconds to execute
I installed WSL out of spite to show that my program compiled way faster when the AV didn't know about it. It went from 18 minutes to about 6.
I'm sure you can find better examples... Not only is a small time window, it also seems to me is more to do with tooling on each environment than your actual IT.
Oh I can think of many examples. That was just the latest one.
There was also the time that IT decided that industrial controls technicians didn't need the ability to manually set IP addresses, or the time where they managed to have %Documents% point to a network share, while they were simultaneously trying to sort out wifi coverage issues.
"If you didn't want me running nmap scans on the corporate network, you shouldn't have let my account use the network interface"
My work would be impossible without WSL, and yes I am guilty of hiding from the security systems... Because the security systems are so invasive they keep locking files I'm trying to open so IDEs don't even work properly under Windows.
Dang. WSL is literally the only thing that maintains my sanity when I am forced to do anything on Windows. I don't work in an enterprise environment, mind you.
Cygwin?
That was the shit for a long time, but it doesn't give you Linux containers.
Huh. That's still around?
Ok so you can provide your users with an option to use a sane OS then.