Intro

Recently I've been faced with a strange endeavor. I received a Windows laptop. The strange part is that I was the only one in the entire technical department with a Windows laptop, everyone else had a MacBook. Of course the project was not made to work with Windows.

The only guys that had Windows before only had it for about a week (as a temporary workstation), but as days passed it became clear that my situation was not the same.

Considering this is 2021 and we have a full-blown chip shortage, I had to work with what was made available to me.

My first choice was to simply use Docker for Windows and Git for Windows, but that didn't prove to be a very good idea. The issue is that Windows apps want Windows line endings (\r\n) while Linux and macOS work with Unix like line endings (\n) and figuring out where to use one or the other proved to be a huge hassle. Even though I figured it out, I still could not commit all the files with the different terminator and I had to stash them before every pull.

How it's done

1. Download and install WSL2 using instructions from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

2. Restart Windows (because that's what Windows users routinely do)

3. From the "Microsoft Store" install a Linux distribution (in this tutorial I will use Ubuntu)

4. After the distro finishes installing, the setup will ask to create a username and password, so choose something appropriate, this will only be for the distro

5. Open a PowerShell with admin rights and run the following commands:

   wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2 wsl --set-default Ubuntu

6. To check if the above steps ran successfully, run in the same shell: wsl -l -v and you should see an entry with Ubuntu and version 2

7. Since you are ready to install Docker, follow the steps from https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/#install-using-the-repository

8. Now the work is almost done, the only remaining part is fixing the fact that the Docker service is not starting automatically;

9. Click on "Start" and search for "Task Scheduler";

10. Click on "Actions" > "Create Basic Task...";

11. Give it a name and click Next;

12. In the Trigger section select "When I log on" and click Next;

13. In the Action section select "Start a program" and click Next;

14. In the "Start a program" screen the value for "Program/script:" is "C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe" and in "Add arguments (optional)" add "-u root service docker start" and click Next and then Finish;

This should be all, now (after a restart) the Docker daemon will start automatically.

I noticed that sometimes Windows doesn't execute the startup tasks if the laptop is not plugged in, if you are faced with this issue, or Docker just didn't start, run inside the distro:

service docker start

Just a suggestion

If you are using the computer only for development, you should really consider switching to a user friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu. Tools like Docker and Git run a lot better on Linux and there is plenty of support for development tools like IntelliJ and VS Code. If you've never tried it before, you might be surprised at how user friendly it now is.

Using Docker on anything other then Linux is a compromise, even on a Mac, and especially on Apple Silicon hardware, which (for now) is even worse than Windows at this.

I've been using Ubuntu for my personal computer for many years and, with very few exceptions, I never needed anything else.