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by dtech 2207 days ago
I thought WSL was a compatibility layer similar to Wine, not a full VM?
2 comments

The original WSL(1) was. However, the new version, WSL2, brings a lot of architecture changes. Now its basically a virtualized Linux running in Hyper-V. The nice thing about that new architecture is that now applications like Docker can use WSL2 to run the containers which was not possible with previous versions.
WSL1 was a translation layer. WSL2 is a VM.