This is one (windows) kernel instance running apps built for linux. VMWare just starts a new OS instance on the same PC - but it has a separate memory/FS/schedu

This is one (windows) kernel instance running apps built for linux. VMWare just starts a new OS instance on the same PC - but it has a separate memory/FS/scheduler/drivers/etc. a lot of overhead, duplication and sync work. Say there's a tool that doesn't have a Windows version, like Facebook Flow didn't have - you can just install the necessary packages and run the linux app on your project folder - plenty of dev tools are built on top of *nix and Windows is a second class citizen in OSS - this solves that problem nicely. Or you can use linux GCC/clang to build the linux binaries on Windows and not muck around with cross compiling.