TOC
Something that I’ve gotten accustomed to over the last few years of using linux and macOs systems is being able to quickly rebuild my computer and setup custom development environments without having to lookup all the settings I like. I knew this was possible in windows, but was a little nervous about the differences in package management and the extra fun of wanting to use WSL.
Why WSL is awesome
I find it much easier to navigate a system, and perform development related tasks from the command line. For the past few years this has meant zsh. I was pleasantly surprised with how nice the default WSL shell was, and I didn’t have any problems running Zsh as usual within it.
Package managment
Choco was suprisingly similar to homebrew, no real issues getting up and running with it. A little bit of concern with the difficulty in validating packages are authentic, but otherwise a great experience.
Getting Started
As with any software project, it’s best to see what’s already out there, and build upon the work of others, rather than try to invent your own special solution. In this case, I found a number of excellent articles and github projects.
https://github.com/Microsoft/windows-dev-box-setup-scripts https://blog.questionable.services/article/accidentally-macos-wsl-windows-development/ https://github.com/elithrar/dotfiles/blob/master/windows-boxstarter.ps1 https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/windows-for-linux-nerds/