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by stephenr 2124 days ago
... So many things wrong with this comparison.

(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.

2 comments

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.

Lighter in that Hyper-V is lighter than VirtualBox.
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.

macOS is UNIX too (Linux isn’t). https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/