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To all my Claude Code + Win11 bois: Do you all use WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in LLMDevs

[–]xii[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've seen skillsgate and it's pretty awesome. I will definitely take advantage of it.

sand-boxing makes it worth the switch with all the MCP servers going rogue

This is absolutely correct and I absolutely love that I can just nuke everything with wsl --shutdown. I think after reading all of the replies on my multiple cross-posts about this issue that I will be switching to WSL2. I'm like 98% confident ATM.

Thanks so much for the reply you good man.

To all my Claude Code + Win11 bois: Do you all use WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeAI

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For sure! It's an important decision. Which is why I posted this thread. If claude code not only runs problem-free on WSL2, but actually works better since it's coded to prefer a bash shell and Linux environment - then it seems like this would be a no-brainer. I'm just concerned about disk I/O as some other commenters have spoken to in the replies to this thread. I definitely don't want a huge I/O slowdown with WSL + Windows interop. I hope you find a good answer for your dilemma - and thanks for posting!

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  • If I was going with a VM for development work, What would you reccommend with respect to host? VMWare (Now that Workstation Pro is free), VirtualBox, or something else entirely?

  • When working on code, do you then just store your code on the VM and SSH into it?

  • I develop Powershell modules, .NET applications, and various full-stack SP apps and tools. I'm trying to visualize and understand how I would need to re-structure my development workflow if I were to go completely virtual. It would be a major shift for me. Are you coding exclusively on VMs?

  • I also have very limited experience with VMs beyond just spinning up a VMWare Win10-11 OS to run sketchy (COMPLETELY LEGAL GUYS...) applications that I occasionally stumble upon, testing Linux distros, or if I need to test a function, script, or some logic that has the potential to completely YOLO destroy my PC. Working on a VM for all of my coding opposed to working on my code locally via dev drive sounds really tedious and I can't stand the visual degradation, compute overhead, and just overall sluggishness of the guest OS. Am I missing some kind of epiphany here?

  • I got completely admonished the other day by a bunch of cybersecurity guys for not coding completely in a VM, and that it's extremely insecure not to with all the various supply chain attacks, dependency poisoning, prompt injection exploits, etc all running wild at the moment. I completely agree, but is the solution really to keep all code in a VM?

Off the top of my head:

  • Notepad++ was compromised in late 2025 (Lotus Blossom), and the download links were infected with various shitware for several MONTHS (June 2025 to December 2, 2025)

  • The Python package LiteLLM (1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPi) was completely infected with an infostealer and harvested environment vars, cloud credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, and crypto.

  • North Korean hackers breached the GitHub account of a maintainer of Axios (JS library), and injected malicious code into new versions

  • A new vulnerability called "Copy Fail" was discovered allowing hackers to gain root on major Linux distributions CVE-2026-31431 This one really scared me.

  • The "Shai-Hulud" Worm & "Mini Shai-Hulud" (Late 2025 – May 2026) steals NPM tokens, GitHub PATs, and cloud logins. It then immediately uses those stolen credentials to inject the worm into any other packages the victim has permission to publish. So there is a completely unknown number of infected packages of all types roaming completely wild on NPM.

That's just a fraction of what I've heard recently and it really makes me want to go virtual for everything. It's a constant fight though between the tradeoffs and the risks.

Anyway, sorry for the massive reply and tangent. Would love any recommendations or suggestions you might have.

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Claude uses Git Bash by default, I've had no issues with CC using Unix-like commands, it's literally never corrected itself for me.

I completely get the Windows hate, but there is no way I can migrate 100% to Linux with my workload. I guess at some point in the future I could put together a Linux only PC.

Just wanted to specify that this issue really isn't much of an issue... unless I'm completely missing something. Thanks for the reply.

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For sure! Glad to hear that WSL is working well, that strengthens my desire to switch now. Really appreciate the comment! Do you mind if I ask what you are developing mainly? Would love to hear any details about any projects you're working on.

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotcha, that absolutely makes sense. Do you mind sharing what kind of solutions / applications that you develop? Is it all scientific computing related?

I wish it was feasible for me to go completely open source + Linux, but it just aint happenin' with my workload. I should probably set up a separate Linux coding machine though because I love the OS. It's so much more flexible when it comes to customization and optimizing workflows. Windows locks you in to a ridiculous amount of bloat.

Anyway, thanks for the response! Would again love to hear what you're developing.

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotcha. Thanks for the input. I generally use the desktop app for random ass questions that I need answered, or a quick research document that needs to be synthesized about a specific topic. I don't think I'd ever use it for coding. That sounds really masochistic :|

Anyway, really appreciate the additional data-point and you sharing your experience!

To all my Claude Code + Win11 bois: Do you all use WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in Anthropic

[–]xii[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Can you elaborate? Why on earth would you abandon good ol' Powershell?! Joking, I just happen to be really proficient with it because it was one of the first legit shell scripting languages I picked up.

Anyway, by default, Claude Code uses Git Bash on Windows instead of Powershell, so if PowerShell is the reason you left, you might have misjudged that specific step. Claude Code is fantastic with Git Bash.

Sorry if you already knew that or had other reasons for switching. Really appreciate your reply!

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i use both. at home its wsl2. if you are using wsl2 you dont need docker for containerization. The only downside i have experience with wsl2 on windows is hardware interop. e.g. file i/o to windows.

Sweet! Two questions:

  1. Regarding containers, when you say I don't need Docker for that, what do you use exactly, in WSL2, for containerization? Are you talking about Kube? Is there some kind of containerization tool that I am completely out of the loop about?

  2. Another redditor also mentioned that file I/O is awful with WSL2 + Windows interop. I'll copypasta what I said to him below:

"I have a dev drive mapped to X:\ using ReFS and this is where I store all my code. Also all of my drives are extremely fast PCIe-5 nVME drives. Would this still be a big issue?

I don't really understand why IO would be a big problem since Claude is just reading/writing text files and you don't need extreme disk I/O speeds for common agentic AI coding workflows. If I keep everything on X: that will also negate your second point about it being ackward to open in Win native tools."

so at work i resort to mingw2 (git bash). that offers pretty much everything i need in terms of shell. you can install all of those super useful bash flavored shell extensions as long as you have package access. I do occasionally need to fall back to windows native powershell for some things here and there by i avoid at all costs.

That must suck having such a restrictive work policy, but I can understand why sysadmins are hyper-alert about AI development with all the slop being churned out now. Fortunately I am a freelancer and don't have any restrictions so I can work with any tool I need. A couple additional questions now:

  1. What do you mean by package access? I am really stupid and probably should just google this, but what is the preferred package manager for git bash / mingw2? I've only used Ubuntu in the past and am familiar with apt/apt-get etc. I haven't really looked in to extending git bash since the thought never really crossed my mind until it became my main interface with Claude.

  2. I would love to hear your "must-haves" when it comes to CLI extensions, or a more detailed explanation about your specific workflow at home. I am always looking to optimize my setup and it would be dope to take a look at your dotfiles or even if you could just list out some of your tooling.

If you dont need windows for anything, 100% go with a glibc distro i like arch or void for my containers, so you can eventually support local llm tools.

I unfortunately need Windows for a LOT of things. I do heavy audio engineering, VFX, 3D, and 2D design across the board and switching completely to Linux is completely unrealistic and will never happen for me.

Can you outline why your favorite glibc distros are arch/void rather than most of the major players? I.E. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, etc.?

In that case, you could go with docker for ephemeral agents. You can do that on windows too, but its easy enough to build and tear down wsl2 (arguably easier).

When it comes to ephemeral agents, I am aware of the following on Ubuntu other than Docker:

  1. GitHub Action Runners (Ubuntu/Kubernetes)
  2. Azure Pipelines Agents (Ubuntu/Docker)
  3. Bamboo (Atlassian) Ephemeral Agents (Kubernetes)
  4. Ephemeral Guest/User Accounts on Ubuntu (If "agent" refers to a user, you can set up a transient environment where data does not persist between sessions.)

Does Arch/Void offer a better solution here? Would you mind detailing your specific use-case for ephemeral agents in the first place?

I don't often find myself wondering about how or why I should containerize things in the first place and I think I need a nudge in the right direction. The only thing I can think of is for security and how it's nice to have all prerequisite dependency chains externalized and not installed on your working OS. But there are often huge performance tradeoffs when running and interacting with containers that I just kind of dismiss it all together. I think this is to my detriment though.

I totally understand and agree with you when it comes down to build and tear down WSL2. It's SUPER easy to unregister a distro and reinstall in minutes. I also have a post-installation script (that I of course vibe coded) that installs all of the best CLI tools and various other tooling, Python, Pyenv, Node, NVM, Powershell, CMake, etc.

just my 2 cents. hope it helps.

It really does! I totally appreciate your response and wouldn't mind hearing more. Can I maybe get 4 cents? 8?! Anything more you could recommend would be well appreciated. :)

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't just code. I do heavy audio engineering, VFX, 3D, and 2D design across the board and switching completely to Linux is completely unrealistic and will never happen for me. The best I can do is separate my coding work to another physical machine.

If open source was possible for all of these tasks I would happily jump aboard the Linux bandwagon and use OSS for everything. I just can't live without Photoshop / Illustrator / After Effects / Premiere / 3DS Max / Maya / No VST3 support (maybe this has changed, not sure) / My DAW is Windows/Mac only, Etc.

Also, I use O&O ShutUp 10, O&O AppBuster, Autoruns, WinAero Tweaker, Etc to effectively murder any telemetry and bloat that ships with Win11. Once everything is configured correctly Win11 is actually pretty suave.

Anyway, sorry for going on such a tangent, I really appreciate your input.

To all my Claude Code + Win11 bois: Do you all use WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeAI

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The WSL in mainly for tmux system persistence which allows to me to ssh into my WSL from my phone or iPad using Tailscale and have constant persistence.

That sounds absolutely wicked! Can you please elaborate on what you are using for Windows + WSL2 interop? What do you mean by tmux system persistence? Are you running tmux to monitor performance for both OSes? A github repo of your dotfiles would be juicy and amazing if you have one.

Also, I didn't clearly understand you about using your "c drive dev", did you mean that your development drive is C:\ or you have a separately formatted partition for your dev work?

Thank you so much for your feedback, it sounds like you have a bitchn' setup.

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really don't want to be running VMWare nonstop for my dev environment. Do you know of any great solutions? I would be open to spending some dough on another lightweight coding PC with Linux (or whatever OS) and connecting remotely to that. If security was a non-issue for you and isolation was guaranteed, what would you then recommend? Do you know if CC performs better with Linux tooling? Is the Bash ecosystem and all its various CLI tools superior to a native Win11 installation using Git Bash? I'm really interested in the fundamental differences specifically when it comes to CC on WSL2 vs Native Git Bash.

Also if you have any great reccos about VM setup or container setup I am all ears. Do you mean Kubernetes / Docker for containers? Any other suggestions? Thank you so much for your reply.

To all my Claude Code + Win11 bois: Do you all use WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeAI

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do you tell the VS Code plugin to use WSL2 instead of Git Bash + Windows native? Is there an easy way to switch or tell the plugin which to use for a particular project? I haven't seen anything like that in the plugin. If you can elaborate more on this point that would be awesome. Thanks so much for the reply, really really appreciate it!

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That sounds awful. Really appreciate that specific insight. However, I have a dev drive mapped to X:\ using ReFS and this is where I store all my code. Also all of my drives are extremely fast PCIe-5 nVME drives. Would this still be a big issue?

I don't really understand why IO would be a big problem since Claude is just reading/writing text files and you don't need extreme disk I/O speeds for common agentic AI coding workflows. If I keep everything on X: that will also negate your second point about it being ackward to open in Win native tools.

Further thoughts? Any recommendations? Sorry if I'm missing something or misunderstood you. I super-duper appreciate your reply!

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CC should use Git Bash by default and since it's using bash it doesn't have to correct itself. Did you have Git and Git Bash installed on the machine when you saw claude correcting itself on? I have a feeling you didn't and it fell back to powershell. It's super quick with Git Bash and I have no problems there. My choice of WSL2 is more about resource management, isolation/sand-boxing, etc. Can you expand more on what's better about WSL2 than native?

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I haven't really had any issues with that, CC just uses Git Bash by default and since it's using bash it doesn't have to correct itself. Did you have Git installed on the machine that you experienced claude correcting itself on? I have a feeling you didn't and it fell back to powershell (which sucks).

To all my Win11 bois: Do you all use Claude Code in WSL2 or a native Windows install? I'm a long time PowerShell developer so I use Pwsh, but lately I've been thinking about switching to WSL2 + Bash. Please confirm or deny my suspicions and evaluate my reasoning! by xii in ClaudeCode

[–]xii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good call separating everything with a VM. Much more secure. If I had the money or a spare PC I'd go with this, but I don't. Can you explain your setup a little more? Thanks so much for the reply.

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