Comment by pjmlp
2 years ago
> For Windows developers, it’s the rise of WSL. Windows was always missing a great UNIX shell and now WSL provides it in spades.
Before WSL, Virtual Box and VMWare Workstation, and SUA to a lesser extent, were already making it.
WSL makes it one less thing to install and configure.
I think a big difference is the way the shell works. That, on Windows today, you can just open up a terminal in your Linux environment (bash/zsh/etc) without thinking about the VM. This becomes a much simpler path than, say, Cygwin, or a hand-managed VMWare guest. And likewise that tools for things like container management can make some reasonable assumptions about the host OS and its Linux capabilities.
You can do similar configuration with VMWare Workstation and SUA (Windows POSIX subsystem).
Windows also has native containers.
They decided to expose them via docker APIs to take advantage of the ecosystem tooling, and nowadays other ones like containerd and runc are also available.