I also considered this, but I was not able to solve the security problems. That remote server must (or not?) hold all my SSH keys, AWS creds, and other stuff, to even be useful. Secops guys would kill me for this. Until then, WSL is good enough.

I know "secops" guys tend to not really understand what's going on, but you can sell it as just a different computer. You could compromise and install whatever handbrake^w security product they like. Bonus points for that computer being separate from the one where you usually browse the interwebs and such.

However, in practice, at least for the kind of compiling I do, AWS EC2 VMs tend not to be faster than my cheap HP Elitebook. Maybe if you can leverage a hefty number of cores, the situation is different. For regular email pushing, the laptop is good enough.

Our secops guys broke most of our laptops so the engineering teams can't use them for development. They told them to use a Hyper-V VM. So they do. With a Hyper-V vswitch that talks directly to the ethernet adapter rather than the VPN connection. So effectively their policy leads to all those SSH keys, AWS credentials and other stuff to be stored on a virtual machine which is connected directly to the public internet and bypasses all DLP and security controls.

The more I work with secops people the more I fail to trust or respect them.

We have a home drive mounted on nfs which is secure.