alt Hacker NewsI, for one, have had to explain to Juniors multiple times that WSL isn't Linux, and why it's no replacement for Linux. Happens almost every time they try to do anything more advanced than a WSL hello world, and it inevitably fails.
I still let them try, because it beats me having to check "is wsl good now", and they learn much better from personal experience than someone more senior who uses arch btw just telling them "don't use windows"
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As someone who develops for both Windows and Linux I find WSL to be very useful. Much better than my previous method of dual booting Linux and Windows. I've yet to run into a problem that I needed to boot into native Linux for.
$ uname -a Linux MYPC 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Jun 5 18:30:46 UTC 2025 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Dunno, looks pretty Linux to me.
(WSL1 did suck badly because it combined the limitations of NT - slow file ops and process spawn - with the limitations of a compatibility layer. WSL2 is good enough for compatibility testing work on e.g. dotnet)
WSL 2.0 is literally a Linux VM running on top of Hyper-V, hardly any different of running a VM on a cloud vendor.
Nowadays WSL implies version 2.0, who is still using the half done implementation of WSL 1.0?
Or using Virtual Box, VMWare Workstation, QEMU,...
WSL1 is not Linux because it is mapping system calls from the Linux kernel ABI to NT. That sounds like what you're describing. WSL2 is a Microsoft distro running in a VM that integrates into Windows.
I use WSL2 every day and it has some annoying quirks with how their Wayland implementation behaves with DWM, but otherwise it's just a Linux environment.
Actually, WSL is pretty good for development. Of course, I wouldn't use WSL to run server software.
Interesting, I've been using it with zero issues (including performance) for several years now. Compiled stuff, ran scientific calculations, trained neural nets with GPU passthrough, even switched over a workload from an old Red hat box to WSL Alma.
Only weirdness has been systemd can sometimes be quirky, and GUI stuff can be glitchy (which doesn't affect me much, because 99% of what I do is in the terminal)
So, anecdotally it is perfectly adequate for workloads beyond a Hello World. What issues are you running into?