I wonder what the stats are of the VSCode remote plugin users but I would wager a cup of water that the majority of users who go this route are dealing with Windows in some fashion. I’d never heard of such witchcraft until I moved to an organization that, for whatever reason, has deemed that Windows laptops are the mandatory choice for web development. WSL does have significant problems (and even when it works you deal with the idiosyncrasy of the magic it does to interact with the Windows environment : try installing docker solely in your wsl2 environment and you’ll find it still looks for an .exe executable or have fun figuring out why some so trivial doesn’t work like it used to because it depended on systemd which is purposely absent from operating systems you might install on WSL2). In truth using WSL2 is a trick, and can add headaches to anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the added abstraction of running another operating system that interacts with your native operating system in ways neither were originally built for. That’s not to say that WSL2 isn’t impressive. It has the ahah that parallels, codeweavers, or wine (to name a few) kind of all bring when they work. And when they don’t it’s also time to get lost in the weeds. But now, especially in its infancy, WSL2 has problems. Why wouldn’t it? It’s new to Windows offerings and relatively obscurely tested given the audience is a small fraction of what they’re up to.

This solution of VSCode + Docker containers seems to sidestep the whole WSL issue as WSL is no longer necessary for development if you’re containerizing everything anyway. While, I must admit, I like the idea of a project having the same steps for all users regardless of platform (to each his own), I don’t believe the majority of people would like to ditch their IDE of choice for the one tool that does this somewhat seamlessly. I’m probably not characterizing this well as I’m new to the workflow and I like to customize my own terminal workflow - which from what I’ve seen this doesn’t lend well to. Lemme just say it - I like the Linux cli workflow more than Windows and have since the beginning. But that’s just me. I’m sure their are plenty of peeps who feel the opposite. What I don’t like and I feel I share the same annoyance is now having to know both Windows and Linux command line interfaces.

Yes you’ve stepped into a rant, gotcha!

Here’s to hoping Microsoft goes full retard and strips out Windows and just maybe go the Edge route: shifting to putting a pretty face on Linux. That would be awesome, I’d buy Microsoft’s distro, frickin base it off Debian and let’s get this show going! Apple ain’t really doing anything special at this point - so your move Satya!