I got my entire blogging workflow copied over to my Windows PC. Why? I’m just too lazy to reach for my laptop mostly.

For me, the easiest way to do this was by installing WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This is mostly because I prefer writing in Neovim, and I’ve got a couple of bash scripts to help me out with a few of the publishing steps. Rather than figure out how to get all that configured properly under Windows, I guessed it would be more straightforward to just setup WSL so I could have an environment that I’m used to. And judging by how easy WSL was to install I’m positive that was the right move.

WSL has several officially supported distros you can easily install from the command line, most notably Ubuntu and Debian. But you know what isn’t on that list that I would’ve really loved to see? Fedora. Thankfully I found a Fedora Remix designed for WSL here on GitHub.

Setting up WSL was a simple wsl --install --no-distribution command. Without that last flag, Ubuntu would’ve been installed by default and I just wanted the base WSL features set up. Installing Fedora was just one of those ‘download and run this executable’ deals. Pretty painless.

After that it was just a matter of pulling my dotfiles and installing the software I wanted through dnf, same as any other Fedora install.

It’s possible to see my Windows filesystem from the Fedora environment, and in fact it’s mounted by default. I doubt it’s recommended to work in there from WSL all the time, but it’s nice to know that moving files between the two should be easy if I ever need to.

So here I am, typing this post in Neovim in Fedora in Windows. Yes, it feels slightly dirty, but also a bit cool. I still plan to add a dedicated Linux drive to this PC in the future, but until then it seems like this will do nicely.

— JP