But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).
The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.
And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).
While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.
Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).
For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.
On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.
So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#is-creative-commons-against...
Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.
I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).
So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.
Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.
We tend to forget that "Horses for Courses" and "Your Mileage May Vary" applies way broader than we think.
But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.
I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.
Why not both? Like me?
It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.
However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.