[throwaway798214]

WSL1 is what keeps me on Windows - but I don't understand why they keep calling WSL2 "WSL" as it has nothing to do with the traditional "Windows service for XXX" model. For better or worse WSL2 is just a virtual machine, nothing else, while WSL1 actually integrates with the underlying Windows with a single network stack etc.

[kyriakos]

Been using wsl2 for development for a long time I don't see how it's not integrated enough with windows. For my use case it seems completely transparent to the fact that it's running in a vm.

[throwaway798214]

Separate network stacks? Separate filesystems? Separate processes and memory allocation? With WSL1 processes started from WSL console appear on Windows Task manager and starting a network daemon on WSL1 uses the Windows network stack and firewall. There's no NAT, no bridging and no VPN problems as you truly are running just a single operating system. WSL2 using but not releasing memory? Not a problem with WSL1 as it doesn't allocate any memory, it just runs processes on top of Windows kernel.

Of course WSL1 has it's limitations as it's not Linux but Windows with Linux userland - anything that touches the Linux kernel directly pretty much doesn't work (like loop mounts etc).