* You can't run your distro of choice unless you build it yourself

* Lots of programs don't work properly (citation needed, can't remember specifics)

* You can only run command line programs, although I understand this could be different in Windows 11

My last job mandated windows laptops so I used WSL for a couple of months before I got too frustrated and just ran a virtualbox VM.

One of the most frustrating thing is that WSL is not a booted Linux. Systemd and other things don't work out of the box even in WSL2. In WSL1 it is almost impossible to make Systemd work, and in WSL2 a wrapper is needed to create a SUID 1 (if I am not wrong) environment to emulate a booted environment. Other than this, the kernel used by WSL2 is a custom, Microsoft-tailored LTS version which may cause some problems if some program rely on very new syscalls.

People are voting me down but it’s mostly from misinformation. WSL runs standard Linux distributions, it’s the real deal, not an imitation or anything that could be considered bad. If you face issues with it it’s mostly because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the setup (for example the person trying to run systemd…), not because it isn’t a „real Linux“.

It is "real linux". Or I should say "real desktop Linux". Most people who don't like it for some reason are trying to use it like a server.

Any virtualization solution has the complexity of the sum of the environments being run simultaneously, the virtualization solution, and the surface where all 3 interact. Furthermore the guest solution inherently deals with the system at a higher level wherein you are stuck with how the host handles lower level aspects.

Such a system is simultaneously worse and more complicated as a necessary price for running both native windows applications and linux ones. In most cases you would be better off just running Windows or running actual Linux.

For example my Linux system has a ZFS root filesystem which provides a lot of interesting features including the ability to boot a prior version of my install at startup, along with 37 other useful things. Running a linux VM with that feature wouldn't magically port this functionality to the rest of the system.

My Linux system is vastly less likely to fall victim to a cryptolocker or other malware situation but running a vm under my Windows desktop wouldn't deliver this benefit.

My Linux system handles virtual desktops per monitor making it easy to swap one monitor at a time to a different workspace or all together if I please. Again neither running an app via a compatibility layer nor a fullscreen VM would provide this functionality.

WSL is Linux light without most of the interesting features and able to be withdrawn any given year by Microsoft. Worse it could be extended in ways that depend on windows features in a classic Microsoft move.

Come on.

Yeah I just use VMWare on Windows and call it a day

tmpfs is mapped to filesystem, so if you need to have tmpfs mount in docker, the performance will be a lot slower

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64401190/can-i-use-docke...

I think you cannot run X-Window applications out of the box

What makes real Linux by your criteria? Linux the kernel is easy driverless installs of hardware, windows isn’t driverless.

mounting network drives is a pain

the windows part.