AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).
You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me.
Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
Agreed. The concept of WSL1 was much more interesting. Interfacing with Windows through a Linux userland. Actually do stuff on the windows system with a familiar interface.
WSL2 is just Linux in a VM which has been around like forever.
By the way it also put my system in a boot loop (blue screen on boot). I tracked it down to a buggy Lenovo driver but when I removed that it crashed on something else and I got sick of it and gave up.
omg thank you for this. The amount of people trying to tell me WSL2 is groundbreaking - meanwhile I have been rocking Fedora in virtualbox for years.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.
To be clear, wsl 2 lets you interact with the Windows filesystem. I believe you can launch exes in wsl1, but not 2. However, I've never needed to do that. It's definitely not groundbreaking, but it is convenient.
Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is clunkier. Overall it reduces friction.
It seems like 9p is the defacto standard for this. With all the network filesystems available, anyone know why that's the case? I personally don't have any experience with 9p.
It's not just running a vm on windows. The integration between the two makes it a lot more streamlined than just running something on virtual box. You can do stuff like browse the windows file system from Linux easily and vice versa. You can also run windows executables from inside Linux to do things like write stdout to your windows clipboard by piping it to powershell.
"Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks."
In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.
If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.
I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.
[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.
Every time Microsoft does something that a couple of people aren't happy with the trumphets of "now is the year of Linux" sound everywhere, in the end the large majority of consumers and the developers that care to get money from those consumers, keep using Windows.
When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.
