Comment by ohazi
4 years ago
Parent is not refuting that WSL2 performed better than WSL1, they're arguing that a reasonable response to WSL1 giving you slow build times might have simply been to use a VM instead.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they didn't want people like you to hop to VMware or VirtualBox and use a full, branded instance of Fedora or Ubuntu, because then you would realize that the next hop (moving to Linux entirely) was actually quite reasonable. So they threw away WSL1 and built WSL2. Obviously WSL2 worked better for you than WSL1, but you also did exactly what Microsoft wanted you to do, which is to their benefit, and not necessarily to yours.
Additionally, the problems that held back WSL1 performance still exist, and WSL1 wasn't their only victim. So Microsoft has abandoned WSL1, but they still need to address those underlying problems. Only now, if they do successfully deal with those issues (most likely as part of their DirectStorage effort and cloning io_uring), we're unlikely to see WSL1 updated to benefit—even though that might result in WSL1 becoming a better user experience than WSL2.