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.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.