[camdroidw]

I remember my "Linux friend" sent me an excited email when WSL was announced, signalling that somehow this meant that Microsoft has conceded. My response: "Finally the year of Linux on desktop". I think that was his last email ;-)

[jchw]

The most interesting thing to me is that some people actually prefer the WSL2 experience over using Linux, not just because of the Windows desktop, but because of the WSL2 experience itself.

I think Distrobox gives you the same basic experience but it's even a bit nicer as it's even lower overhead and doesn't have the weird memory management issues that WSL2 has. But this is really interesting to me; Microsoft clearly struck a nerve with the WSL2 workflow. It's more than just a workaround for the fact that some stuff doesn't run or doesn't run well on Windows, which is counterintuitive.

You can also get the same basic experience on macOS using Orbstack, which I highly recommend in general. (Though there are alternatives that are not subscriptions, but I only use macOS under duress at work, so I don't personally pay for it.)