I tried WSL a few times but for real world every day development it's just not usable at all. The file mount performance is crippling slow. A Rails app takes 30+ seconds to see changes vs nearly instant on native Linux.
Before I moved to Windows 10 I routinely had 150+ day uptimes. The old VMWare is rock solid and runs really fast.
Having to use an older version of xubuntu does kind of stink, but I'm pretty sure if you really cared you could use 16.04, but just downgrade xfce to use 14.04's version.
It's not something I bothered with because visually I'm happy with the way things look, using custom PPAs are easy and I use Docker for various programming language runtimes and services.
If anyone is interested in running Linux on Windows in a way that's suitable for full time development then check out this screencast / blog post: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-devel...
I've been using this set up for many years.
The pros of the above method are:
- It's free
- It's as fast as native Linux
- It's actually Linux from end to end
- You get independent floating Linux windows (graphical apps work)
- You can still run your Windows apps
- Works flawlessly with dual monitors
- No need to dual boot
- Takes about 15-20 minutes to set up your first time