Another shout out for WSL2. Feels good to have real Linux not Apple's kind of close but not quite, plus wide range of hardware to choose from and compatibility with commercial GUI apps.
(a). WSL is just a Linux VM. You can do this on any desktop OS. If you're not using WSL, you can even do it with multiple hypervisors at once if you so wish.
(b). macOS isn't, and has never tried to be, "Linux". It's POSIX.
There's a little more to wsl2 than just a VM. It's lighter and partially integrated. More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
> More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
It's not like that, it literally is that, because to enable WSL2 you end up running Windows itself on top of Hyper-V, and the Linux VM as a parallel VM.
> It's lighter and partially integrated.
I don't know what you think it's "lighter" than - it's a VM running on Hyper-V.
Given that with WSL/Hyper-V you'll be running Windows in a VM permanently, and WSL.. whenever it thinks you need it (maybe always too?) while Vbox you can just stop when you wish, it seems weird to refer to one as "lighter".
They're very different approaches with different tradeoffs for each.
Yes it's fantastic. Even the small things make a difference - for example, it's really nice to be able to use the same package manager on my local machine as I use on my Google Cloud servers, on which I'm running Ubuntu, instead of having to use brew. I can use GNU variants of CLI utilities like ps, head etc. rather than the quirky BSD variants found on Mac OS X. iTerm2 was binding me to Mac OS for a while, but Windows Terminal Preview is getting quite good, and IntelliJ itself has a very good built-in terminal that works well with WSL2.
(a). WSL is just a Linux VM. You can do this on any desktop OS. If you're not using WSL, you can even do it with multiple hypervisors at once if you so wish.
(b). macOS isn't, and has never tried to be, "Linux". It's POSIX.