emacs WSL2 vs Windows native

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I have the same issue. Even running in a Linux VM my Emacs loads much faster than the native Windows version with the same config.

The WSL2 version works so well that I haven't bothered with the native one. Compiling from source is a breeze and all the other infrastructure I use (lsp servers, spellcheckers, latex, etc) work seamlessly. Fair play to them, Microsoft have done a good job with WSL2 - it feels like I'm using a linux box that just happens to run windows programs when required!

Wsl2 is better AS LONG as you have your files within wsl. If you have your files in windows and access them via /mnt/c, it is hell.

It's a common thing.. NTFS just isn't great with lots of small files, ask any nodejs developer or basically anyone checking out large git repositories on a regular basis :) But it DOES handle the large harddisk file for WSL a lot better and in there, it's ext4 which then deals with the minutiae of all your small elisp files :)

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I have last year or two experienced that mingw version has become slow compared to GNU/Linux version. No idea why, but I don't remember it was the case some few years ago. I run both Windows and Linux on the same machine (dual boot). Each system runs on its own M.2 970 Pro drive. The Windows drive is connected to PCIExpress channel while the second M.2 is connected via SATA channel on an extra chipset that comes with my [motherboard](https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z170X-Gaming-7-rev-10#ov), which in theory has more limited throughput compared to the one on pciexpress lanes. Linux is on ext4 file system, vs native NTFS5 in Windows 10. I use almost the exact same [setup for Emacs](https://github.com/amno1/.emacs.d) on both systems, however the startup time is radically slower on Windows. On Linux, it is ~0.5s for my setup, and on Windows with MSYS2 (mingw) it is ~3 seconds. I have no answer, why this drastic difference in startup time. That does not bother me personally; I am using Windows once in a blue moon nowadays, so I don't really care, but it would be interesting to know why such big difference.

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The startup of Windows native could be reduced to 2 seconds. See https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ws017t/comment/ikvob4j/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

it takes a few seconds for GNU Emacs 28.1 to load on my Win 10 system, maybe 5 seconds or so. it's a pretty normal configuration, a thousand lines and some manually installed packages. wsl is instant, but the GUI version is much better (Alt + Super + Hyper + C-m + C-i make it so (plus a whole bunch of other things)), and, through it (the GUI version), I can still use the WSL programs that I want.

I have years using MSYS2 version and works very well, never had an issue. I use Emacs vanilla with my own customization.

The files I share between environments and machines are on a separate drive, and I have symbolic links in my WSL2 home directory to the entry points I need. I use dropbox to sync files to various machines, but any other tech that does the same job would be fine.

Do you mean files you're editing or the files that Emacs requires?

Just remember to keep your files inside wsl, accessing windows files is painfully slow

editing. The interaction of the windows fs with WSL is quite slow.

I use straight with use-package and LSP , themes ... and I can reach <4sec Here is my config! https://github.com/bodnarlajos/emacs-pure

I use native Win32 Emacs, but with my own fairly minimal configuration. It starts in a second or so. Perhaps Spacemacs does something strange, or perhaps it's just a million small things that add upp.