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This this this. I also find that, for me, cygwin is a better solution for what I want: A bash shell and a decent set of unix-like command-line tools, that (cri

This this this. I also find that, for me, cygwin is a better solution for what I want: A bash shell and a decent set of unix-like command-line tools, that (critically) uses the same filesystem as Windows programs do. I've honestly been kind of perplexed by all the excitement around WSL. A lot of people seem to say they want it for "development", by which I guess they mean web development. And I could see WSL being a nice alternative to running a full Linux VM for web development. But I don't do web development (mostly). I just want a unix-like shell and tools on my Windows box. And I don't want to have to think about whether the files I'm creating and working on live in Linux-land or Windows-land.

manigandham 6y ago
As stated, WSL2 is a full Linux VM. It's a real Linux kernel which means you have 100% compatibility for all Linux tools instead of workaround Cygwin. Also the filesystem access is shared. That's why WSL is a separate thing, otherwise you could always just run a VM yourself. WSL lets you easily browse files, operate on the same files, and even call processes and pipe results across both sides.