Yep Virtualbox is still the way to go. I actually run it the other way around at work, Linux on my host and Windows guest. Seems to work pretty well. I doubt Linux shell on Windows will ever be that good until Microsoft makes a new file system (or adopts an existing Linux based one, although that's unlikely given differences in how the two OS's do permissions and such).

Personally I think you only should use Virtualbox if you're using Linux apps with a GUI. For every other situation WSL has less overhead (no, I don't have a citation for that) is far easier to start (literally just type "bash" in any shell) and interops better with your existing filesystem (cd /mnt/c/ and you can access everything on your C:/ drive, it's that simple).

>WSL has less overhead

In my experience, Linux in Virtualbox is a lot faster then WSL. I'm not talking barely noticeable here, I'm talking operations taking 0.2 seconds vs 10-15 seconds (on an SSD) in the worst case. It's literally faster for me to do shit in Linux and rsync it back to Windows than it is for me to deal with WSL at this point. The only overhead is memory and CPU, of which I have plenty. I don't have plenty of time.

>far easier to start

I just keep my Linux virtual machine open, so it's just an alt-tab away. At work, I run it the other way around (Windows as the virtual machine). It's basically the same story.

The bottleneck is file system as far as I remember. I can compile my a linux kernel in VM with static file system in reasonable time. But try to do it in WSL, the file system overhead makes it miserable (Make and Configure open and close file extensively). other than that, ordinary computation is almost same as Desktop Linux (better than VM).

There was a benchmark on http://phoronix.com which proves my point.

Oh I get that, I mentioned the file system being the culprit elsewhere in the thread. Doesn't really change the point regardless, the gist of the matter is that until Windows fixes its filesystem it's much more efficient for me to run it in a VM than to use WSL.

Allow me to hijack this thread with a question to a wider audience: Has anyone managed to run a VM with Linux on a Windows host that has acceptable performance?

My previous attempt a while ago to run Linux on a Win7 host via Virtualbox was unsatisfactory because the performance of Linux's GUI was very slow I tried to run PyCharm but it was painfully slow with noticeable lag.

I've never had performance issues with Linux in a VM. Barely slower than running it dual booted. I mean, I run light WMs (originally AwesomeWM, but the past year or two I've been using xmonad). But I don't remember the interface being slow when using, say, Gnome 3.

The only things I can think of that might be special about my setup is that I generally: 1. Run the VM off of a different physical disk than the host OS (only necessary if you're using HDDs) 2. Allocate generous amounts of RAM (4-8gb) even though very little RAM is required. 3. Use machines that have 4+ cores.