If you’re like me, you probably love the Claude models. But when you tried Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI on Windows (specifically inside WSL, where most of us prefer to do our coding), the experience felt completely broken.
It was borderline unusable. We’re talking freezing for several seconds at startup, hanging before every / command, and even stuttering while typing. Since coding with AI usually works better in a Linux environment compared to PowerShell (where AI tooling compatibility can be a bit hit or miss), feeling blocked from using WSL smoothly with Claude Code was a huge turn-off.
Well, good news: there is a ridiculously easy fix!
Now that the Windows 10 May 2020 Update is finally available to everyone, without requiring to join the Windows Insiders program and install preview versions, it’s finally time to embrace WSL2.
WSL2 is the second iteration of the Windows Subsystem for Linux which finally allows running linux virtualized inside Windows. This new version brings real virtualization using a real linux kernel, but, compared to a traditional virtual machine, it runs on a lightweight hypervisor getting close to bare-metal performance.
This will also be used by Docker under the hood, boosting the start-up time and general performance of our containers. Sweet! Furthermore, with WSL2, VPN connections automatically propagate to linux correctly, which is great news when working from home.
So, let’s stop talking and get to update our Ubuntu 18.04 WSL environment to Ubuntu 20.04 running on WSL2.
