Starting my development journey on Windows many years ago, discovering Linux and eventually daily driving MacOS for years - WSL1 has enabled me to once again ma

Starting my development journey on Windows many years ago, discovering Linux and eventually daily driving MacOS for years - WSL1 has enabled me to once again make Windows 10 my daily driver for both work and play for the last year. I spent several months using WSL2 but because the implementation attempts to hide virtualization behind a curtain, it was unclear where the magic successfully blended the guest with the host and where it didn't. I ended up having a lot of trouble with networking, and leaned heavily on my understanding of virtualization to debug those issues: - Connections to Windows VPNs wouldn't work well inside the WSL guest - Running browser automation tools like Playwright wouldn't allow you access to the browser in Windows - The WSL2 guest can't connect to services (tcp, ports, whatever) running on the Windows host - Trying to do something like `ssh -D 1337` from inside the WSL guest is confusing - If you run `ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 remote.com` using powershell, the WSL guest does not have access to port `8080`. While incredible in that it has dynamic VM memory allocation and such, it still felt like running Linux in VirtualBox, SSHing into it and having a lot of automation to handle port forwarding - a workflow I have used in the past and isn't very revolutionary. WSL1, while a simpler implementation that is more feature constrained, I felt that it matched my behavioural expectations (an API mapping that isn't feature complete) making it more useful. I continue to daily drive it. Windows Terminal also made Windows competitive with other OSes that have quality terminal emulators, such as `iTerm2` or `gnome-terminal` (`hyper` is too memory heavy, though `cmder` is not too bad). It's my understanding that MS wants to focus on Hyper-V to make VMs more like containers, but for my simple use-case/world view, I would rather the "reverse Wine" world of WSL1 to the "enhanced VM" world of Hyper V. I will continue to use WSL1 daily and hope MS chooses to focus on this style of integration over the WSL2 style. I'd love to see features like blending `/etc/hosts`, supporting `tmpfs` and containerization (without virtualization). If MS deprecates WSL1, I will probably move back to MacOS or Linux.