[vesinisa]

> Are you trying to make a point or something here?

Nah, just curious/intrigued by how these stack.

OS-level virtualization is very much a thing. I'd be interesting to compare this to the approach taken by Docker Dekstop for Mac. I bet they do something quite similar (hypervisor-based virtualization like Virtualbox) - nothing fancy like WSL1 that I believe runs a sort of "tortured" Linux kernel inside the NT kernel.

[simiones]

WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel at all - it was implementing the Linux user-space API over the Windows NT kernel. Well, some of it - not enough to run Docker, for example.

Docker on Windows and Mac does the same as what is described above - it runs a Linux VM and runs the docker server inside that, and then does a little magic to expose native OS paths and so on to that VM. On Windows, it uses WSL2 by default now, but WSL2 is also a Hyper-V VM in the end, with some Windows magic to blend it more nicely in Windows workflows.