Me, no, I have only played around with it. From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1, which I thought was more elegant. I am happy to concede your points as it certainly sounds like you have more experience with it than me.
WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes.
From what I've seen over my working life, I'd say about 0.1% of Windows users would have the level of knowledge needed, and possibly more Linux ones -- but they mostly wouldn't want it or care.
My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux.
No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors:
> From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1
Same. WSL1 was ambitious, wild, and incredibly impressive despite the flaws that eventually convinced Microsoft to start over with WSL2.
> WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes.
Agreed! WSL2 has a very impressive OOTB experience in terms of getting you from nothing to a VM that you can use. It would be a lot of work to set up comparable integrations yourself.
> My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux.
Unfortunately I can't disagree. People seem to think that MICROS~1 is dead, but as far as I can tell they're in a very similar monopoly position with more or less the same interests now as they've ever had.
> No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors:
In that case, Orbstack and Lima might be tools worth your writing, the same way hypervisors and virtualization apps are! They're attempting to be WSL2-alikes but they don't use their own hypervisors (Lima supports qemu and Apple's virtualization framework, idk about Orbstack.)
Me, no, I have only played around with it. From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1, which I thought was more elegant. I am happy to concede your points as it certainly sounds like you have more experience with it than me.
WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes.
From what I've seen over my working life, I'd say about 0.1% of Windows users would have the level of knowledge needed, and possibly more Linux ones -- but they mostly wouldn't want it or care.
My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux.
No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/utm_apple_hypervisor_...