> From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1 Same. WSL1 was ambitious, wild, and incredibly impressive despite the flaws that eventually convinced Mic

> From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1 Same. WSL1 was ambitious, wild, and incredibly impressive despite the flaws that eventually convinced Microsoft to start over with WSL2. > WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes. Agreed! WSL2 has a very impressive OOTB experience in terms of getting you from nothing to a VM that you can use. It would be a lot of work to set up comparable integrations yourself. > My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux. Unfortunately I can't disagree. People seem to think that MICROS~1 is dead, but as far as I can tell they're in a very similar monopoly position with more or less the same interests now as they've ever had. > No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors: In that case, Orbstack and Lima might be tools worth your writing, the same way hypervisors and virtualization apps are! They're attempting to be WSL2-alikes but they don't use their own hypervisors (Lima supports qemu and Apple's virtualization framework, idk about Orbstack.)