People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.
I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.
“ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes.
Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system that abstracts it all away and does it for you is easier, and most new users want that, so it often wins. Worse is better etc
virt-manager is a bit more involved than GNOME's Boxes, I'm not sure I could recommend it to someone that doesn't know what they're doing.
I'm pretty sure there are solutions to assign an entire GPU to a VM, which ofc is only useful if you have multiple. But those are specialized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
This probably isn't even the best dang comment about the situation, it's just the one I could find quickly.
>Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.
Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.
Sure, it’s trivial to set the switch in BIOS for virtualisation, and download a couple of libraries but people like computers doing things for us, we like abstractions even if they sacrifice flexibility because they facilitate whatever the real world application we are attempting.
I think power users of any technology will generally overvalue things that 80% to 95% of the user base simply don’t care about.
I admit that having touched Windows twice in the last 5 years I wouldn’t know but I would be willing to wager that WSL has very few drawbacks or shortcomings in the minds of most of its users.