In all honesty, I've used Docker Desktop on WSL2 quite a bit too and the overhead is very minimal (additional memory consumption mostly).
Avoiding a transformational technology like containers (OCI is used by multiple implementations now, like containerd, podman etc) because of this seems a little silly to me.
> ... unless you're running Windows containers (on Windows).
But aren't most Windows containers a bit on the heavier side? And don't you then need to also use the whole MS server setup for deploying your stuff to prod, which is a no-no in certain settings?
Edit: provided that you can even find an image for the software you need (from an official provider/latest versions/with proper instructions and source). Consider the following:
Then again, WSL2 is pretty okay for running *nix based OCI containers, apart from the file permissions (SSH keys and anything like that is a pain, especially with bind mounts).
Even a Hyper-V VM was a decent choice, though any sort of a performance overhead was also negligible - I've heard the story being worse on OS X in regards to disk performance, though not sure whether that's still relevant. The worst thing about Docker on Windows has generally been the weird bind mount syntax for the Windows file system paths (not too bad, to be honest) as well as the whole file permission thing, as well as the Hyper-V approach eating some of your RAM in the background.
Apart from that, it's mostly passable, though Docker/Podman on *nix is comparatively painless. Though I could say that about most development ecosystems, from PHP to Java. Windows is just generally better for certain classes of desktop software and gaming, *nix is generally better for most development related tasks and servers. /opinion
