OP here (disclaimer, I work for Microsoft, but I'm a Linux and Mac guy on the Azure team). Yes, it really has. Originally many things didn't work, node, redis, others wouldn't even run. Now I can't find anything that won't run at all and my only complaint overall is that disk IO is a little slower than on the Windows side of things. Overall it's really nice. Zero changes to my Ubuntu dotfiles.
Look at the cousin post to yours in this thread. As is often the case, the use-cases of the programmers are quite different from the use cases of many other users, but the system is optimized only for the programmer's use cases.
My machine only crashes maybe once every other week now. Mostly when I'm copying files in/out of the WSL filesystem, or doing any disk intensive tasks, such as npm install.
I do all my work in vim/tmux, and I run that inside of XFCE terminal running in WSL, connected to Xming. So all and all, it's better than Cygwin but I'd much rather use a Mac or Linux/BSD.
It's also quite special as it needs raw socket access (doesn't it work in connect() mode though?), it is on the backlog though as I understand.
Other things that won't work are fuse and VPN's and loading arbitrary kernel drivers (it's surprising how many people don't seem to get that it only implements userland compatibility)
I tried to do some Golang development on Windows using the Buffalo framework[0]. At first, I got started by just using the Windows-compatible Go distribution.
The CLI tool wouldn't install because sqlite was listed as a dependency and it had compilation issues. I spent around an hour trying to look at using cygwin or some other equivalent to get a semi-sane devtool setup before I gave up and turned to WSL.
To my chagrin, WSL now has to be installed through the Windows Store - Linux distributions are downloadable apps. Now, I had a local Windows account so every time I tried to install Ubuntu through the store I got "something happened on our end." I'm a bit slow so it took me a while to realize that I had to sign in with a Microsoft account to use the Windows app store. I had one laying around so I signed in installed Ubuntu.
Filled with hope, I popped into WSL's bash terminal and installed Go, Node, and the Buffalo CLI. However, each invocation of `buffalo dev` took several seconds to run. Like, ten to fifteen seconds. I became overwhelmed with frustration and installed Antergos into a virtual machine and just rolled with that. And everything worked.
I just... I dunno. It's cool that WSL exists but every time I try to use it... meh.
