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I just got a new laptop, which I chose mainly for its long battery life. It has an i5 8th gen processor and 8GB of RAM. It came with Windows 10 Home.
Now I am intrigued by the idea of having a Linux terminal on my Windows laptop, and am therefore considering paying and upgrading to Windows 10 Pro in order to enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
What I'm wondering is whether either of these two things (upgrading to Pro and enabling WSL) would noticeably affect the performance of my machine (whether processor load, memory usage, or battery usage).
Does anyone have any idea?
EDIT: It is clear to me now that WSL does not require Windows 10 Pro. But I think both parts of this question are still worthy questions.
4You don't have to upgrade to Windows 10 Professional to use Windows Subsystem for Linux. If the only feature you want to enable is WSL, you can do that with Windows 10 Home, WSL does not use VT-x and is NOT a hypervisor. – Ramhound – 2018-11-27T21:14:10.127
1@Ramhound Hmm... I was under the impression it was necessary, but thanks for letting me know. I've been finding conflicting information online. – Matt – 2018-11-27T22:18:53.970
2I have no idea what information you are reading but WSL has never required Windows 10 Professional. – Ramhound – 2018-11-27T23:36:56.247
@Ramhound WSL uses a part of Hyper-V for networking (undocumented). – Biswapriyo – 2018-11-28T05:23:20.910
@Biswapriyo - I don’t believe that. It does not match my experience with WSL. – Ramhound – 2018-11-28T05:34:28.720
@Biswapriyo I have successfully enabled and started using WSL on Windows 10 Home, so WSL certainly does not require Hyper-V to be enabled. However, perhaps you mean that certain features are shared between Hyper-V and WSL, and work in WSL even when Hyper-V is not enabled. It certainly sounds believable that the implementation of networking is shared between them. – Matt – 2018-11-28T12:26:07.190