Before COVID-19 cut the possibility of public gatherings, we had plenty of offline hackathons or contribution days in the Magento community world. An essential part of a working toolkit at such events is, obviously, a laptop (there were gurus that wrote the code even on tablets but that’s a different story). At every table, alongside ten developers with serious expressions, you would typically find at least seven MacBooks and three other devices running Ubuntu. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a developer who uses a Windows-based laptop as their workstation, but this is a rare exception.

The growing unpopularity of Windows-based laptops among web-developers in the past has its roots. There was a period when Windows could not provide a toolkit powerful enough for productive web application development. Many developers, who made the switch from Windows to OSX or Linux, never looked back. But during the last few years, the situation with the Windows platform has changed dramatically. Microsoft took the direction of improving the development tools they own (VS Code, WSL) and acquiring new ones (GitHub). We would like to share our recent experience in building Magento 2 local development environment using Docker and WSL 2.