Comment by grammarxcore
2 years ago
WSL has been out for at least five years now and it’s still just a fancy kernel adapter without feature parity. I might begin to worry once things like containers actually work properly. Until then, I don’t think Microsoft has fully embraced Linux much less extended it.
I did just now learn that systemd was finally added to WSL. Originally that was never going to be added and back in the days of WSL 1 I remember the WSL writing blog posts about that being ridiculous. Who knows, proper container support might be added soon.
Containers do work in WSL2, although you hit Hyper-V bugs if you spin up very many of them. WSL2 is the basis of Docker Desktop and similar apps.
Microsoft has also already added proprietary extensions to WSL2, like the integration with the VSCode remote development plugin and DirectX passthrough for machine learning and maybe other things (there's a DirectX driver on Linux which is usable only on WSL guests).
We're at the embrace stage right now, that's why you see it getting integrated.
And if you run WSL, you usually end up with a special kernel, it's not just the upstream one without changes.
Both my Arch and Ubuntu WSL is on kernel `Linux desktop 5.15.90.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2` rather the ones the distributions ship with by default if installed normally. This is the one they ship via Windows Update which you end up using on WSL: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel
Watch them slowly make it different than the upstream one, without contributing patches upstream.