GenderNeutralBro, 1 year ago

Having used both, I don’t find WSL comparable to macOS’s native unix shell. Aside from the bloat of it, integration with the rest of the OS is troublesome on Windows, and WSL apps are second-class citizens. On macOS, there is no “rest of the OS” because the unix shell is fundamental. It’s not running in a virtual environment like WSL; it is the native environment.

Microsoft details some of the little gotchas of WSL in their FAQ: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq . A few notable ones:

the WSL 2 architecture uses virtualized networking components, which means that WSL 2 will behave similarly to a virtual machine – WSL 2 distributions will have a different IP address than the host machine (Windows OS).

As of right now WSL 2 does not include serial support, or USB device support

If you have no open file handles to Windows processes, the WSL VM will automatically be shut down. This means if you are using it as a web server, SSH into it to run your server and then exit, the VM could shut down because it is detecting that users are finished using it and will clean up its resources.

WSL is a great addition to Windows, but it’s still kind of a band-aid.