I find that most of the linux-like versions of user-space tools can be installed via homebrew. What functionality would you been hoping for from a linux vm? would this VM be able to have any GPL v3 licensed tools?

Yeah, the drive for a "WSL" is really because Microsoft/Windows doesn't play nice with the *nix world of tools/commands that developers are falling in love with.

With OSX, the terminal experience is great, no need for a "WSL" over there!

This is an interesting take considering Linux is Unix-like and macOS is technically a BSD derivative. I don’t think macOS will ever have a Linux syscall translation layer/subsystem (WSL1) nor a lightweight VM with special integration (WSL2) but you can do sort of similar things in third party software, I think. Docker for Mac is using the native VM framework and includes a filesystem integration called osxfs, but despite mentioning the source code in documentation it does not appear to be open source at this time?

Exactly. It really doesn't need a syscall translation layer anyway given its Unix + BSD and POSIX foundations. Although this open-source project [0] does exist for macOS but it looks like its inactive.

[0] https://github.com/linux-noah/noah

doesn't macOS put a BSD translation of some sort in their kernel? Theres a microkernel, a driver api (device kit) and then 'bsd'

random wikipedia image that somewhat supports what I was thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#/med...

The actual API layers are nowhere near that clean ;)

Darwin doesn't use a microkernel, but yeah they straight-up grafted a BSD syscall layer onto a Mach base.

Not by Apple, but here’s two:

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

https://github.com/linux-noah/noah

They have varying stages of support for Linux syscalls.

Docker is on macOS using the native hypervisor framework, what would be the point?

and it has some serious file system performance issues that make docker for mac a non-starter for some projects:

https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs/#performance-is...

I've used docker-sync to get around these performance issues.