Windows is one of the historic and most used and installed O.S in the world. I had a high and lows relationship with it but still I always used it either at home or at work. On the past years my home computer is an Mac and I have being using linux mainly on vms/containers or remote. Now I am back working on daily basis on a windows machine and compared to my previous experience ( Windows 8 ), windows 11 is a totally different experience. Mainly on my opinion now due to the Windows Linux Subsystem.

I am writing here how I set my machine and what kind of troubles I runned into. This text is mainly a working in progress both on content as well as I am adjusting it to my daily needs.

Configuring and using a Windows Workstation for Cloud Development

I mainly do software development for cloud, so usually I will run only subsets of the application locally, mainly on containers. The first thing I did was configure a way to use docker that is my main runtime now.

The docker oficial desktop application is not something I like, but I use it on mac os because still easier ( but buggy ) than the other options. But the on the work computer the license of docker desktop is quite restrictive so I need somehow install docker vanilla and deal with it. So why not to run it on the WSL? I tried and in the end worked quite well. I followed the official documentation and installed ubuntu and worked quite well.

Installing Docker

Just install it as you would do normally on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install docker.io
sudo dockerd &
sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock

You may want to automate the last two commands, since every restart they need to run again, I don’t mind run the commands after every restart.

Recurrent Problems on WSL

Sometimes the computer sleeps and when it wakes up, you may need to restart the whole WSL. Well it is windows after all.

wsl --shutdown

Another thing is that you may get is random permissions or logon not allowed failures when trying to restart it. So you need to restart the vm-computing subsystem from windows:

# On PowerShell
# FIX the "Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer." 
# after a restart on wsl
Get-Service vmcompute | Restart-Service