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If you are anything like me, you might have given Google Antigravity a go, as I did in a recent post, and decided that there is not yet any WSL support given the extension marketplace specifically says This extension is not compatible with Antigravity.
However… it turns out that even if this is the case, the Remote-WSL: Connect to WSL option still appears in the command pallet, and is usable even without the extension installed?!
I have been primarily developing on WSL for some years now, and still love the combination in terms of all around flexibility. When primarily working on Linux based or focused applications, everything is lovely! However, I’m spending more time straying into the land of hardware, USB devices, and custom IDEs and debug interfaces that are … Read more
This post is meant as a warning, DONT DO IT, without some research first.
But if you end up here, you have likely already made the mistake ;)
It in this case is, “this” is…
sudo apt install kubuntu-desktopBefore you attempt this, do some reasearch, head the warning, and be casefull (maybe even backup your disk so you can undo the mess if you make it ;).
If you have already done this and partially bricked your Ubuntu installation, don’t worry, you can fix it!
Symptoms
apt, dpkg, service commands and more basically unresponsive and hangingsudo su etc might also not workI’ll start by saying that ultimately you want to read and follow the Connecting USB devices documentation for WSL.
However, a few things cropped up along the way that I think might be worth writing down for future me, and others.
Firstly, you need to be on WSL2.
Next, install the USBIPD-WIN program.
winget install --interactive --exact dorssel.usbipd-winCode language: CSS (css)In windows cmd or powershell, you can use usbipd list to list all devices. This should line up with what you see in Windows device manager if you open it.
I briefly touched on my OpenSSH agent to WSL2 solution back in 2021. Today find myself setting up a new Windows 11 laptop and running into a couple of different issues, and ultimately using a slightly different solution than before, so here is the short writeup glossing over the areas that lead me to get a little stuck, and hopefully outlining a good set of commands.
In my old .bashrc file, I found a comment linking me to the rupor-github/wsl-ssh-agent GitHub repository which was my first set of reading, specifically the WSL2 compatibility section. The main sticking issue for me out of the box was a miss match in the OpenSSH version between Windows and WSL2, with Windows starting on 8.6 but WSL2 with Ubuntu starting on 8.9. This lead to errors such as:
And more…
It’s no secret that I develop using Windows and WSL. For the past few years, I have also primarily used VSCode as my go-to development environment.
Between 2012 and 2018 I mainly used Jetbrains IntellijJ IDEA, but I found the speed of VSCode (launched in 2015), along with the modern design and vibrate plugin ecosystem, to win me over.
Every now and again I have found myself dipping back into the suite of Jetbrains IDEs, primarily for their high-quality code refactoring tools, nothing that I have seen in the VSCode ecosystem has quite lived up to this functionality.
Jetbrains Fleet was announced in 2021, and was behind a waitlist until this past week. It’s now in public preview!
This is exciting, as it’s advertised as “lightweight” with code processing engines running separately, similar to what is done in VSCode. But also contains their “20 years of experience developing IDEs”, which I hope will maintain the high-quality refactoring tools. Not to mention built-in “distributed” working modes for remote development, thus built-in WSL project integration.
So here is a very first look at using Fleet with a project in WSL2 land.
I’m trying to do some “modern” Android development and want to experiment with Flutter while running Windows, and WSL2 with Ubuntu.
Flutter isn’t as easy to install as some programs, no simple apt-get etc, but instead a collection of binaries distributed by different organizations that all need to be tied together.
To start with, you’ll want to read Installing Flutter 2.0 on WSL2 by Josh Kautz. This can guide you through getting Flutter and also the Android SDK with some copy & paste commands.
This post is inspired by these simple steps there to make this easy for folks to copy for Android Studio.
The Windows developer experience has evolved quite allot in the last 5-10 years. I now spend most of my development life running Windows with WSL2 and using Windows Terminal and winget. So here are a few pointers from my experiences so far.
WSL2 is what you want! The first version of WSL was a step in a great direction, but had many cons, such as IO performance. It should be fairly easy to install and will provide you a full Linux Kernel accessible from within Windows.
WSL also has access to your Windows filesystem via a mount at /mnt/c. Generally if you are using Linux tooling, you’ll want your file access to remain in the Linux file system. For example, I have almost all of my git repositories checked out in my Linux file system. For the odd repository that I use mainly Windows tooling I leave in Windows land.
VSCode seems to be one of the up and coming IDEs over the last year. I personally switched from Jetbrains IDEs to VSCode fo most of my development work at some point in 2020.
Apparently up until now I have avoided running the PHP debugger Xdebug. I had to do a little search around to figure out the correct settings for my setup decided to write them down in this handy blog post.
