(Also yes, it is unintuitive that you may want to install VSCode first in order to edit Windows Terminal settings, but is it that much of a stretch that Microsoft would imagine early adopter power users to have VSCode lying around already on their machines? As you said, they are working on a "proper" UI for Settings still, but as a first "get it out the door MVP release", especially with all the under the hood work that took to get them there, it still seems a reasonable play.)

I didn't use WSL2 for too long and so I wonder: are processes in WSL2 manageable by Task Manager and Windows Defender as in WSL1? That integration with Windows tooling made WSL1 killer for deploying tools to non-programmers; give them a powershell script and they can run the app and manage it in a familiar way.

I haven't tried (just installed Windows 10 v1909 last night) but I don't think so, given that WSL2 sits in a VM, which WSL1 didn't.

I liked WSL1, but it had a lot of the same drawbacks that Cygwin had, which was that Windows and Linux are different enough under the hood that you start running into issues with file system performance and containers, and WSL2 fixes that at the cost of being clumsier with file management.

The solution I recall for WSL2 is to put the shared files inside the Linux instance instead of putting it in NTFS.

What requirement do you have that has to be managed without going over to the Linux side of the system?

The game development scenario feels to me like a case where a Windows based toolchain is going to be more coherent. I might be missing something though.

No, we don't/won't support a Linux port of our product at this time, and as a primary developer it's not worth my time to be hassled by it.

But WSL1 is _so nice_. I've fought with MSYS, MSYS2, Cygwin, various other bash environments and such, and I find none are quite as good as WSL1+X410.

And, let's be honest, if WSL2 is just another VM then it's a worse product than the other VMs that are available and far more mature. Hell, Canonical's Multipass is as good or better.

I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.

I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.

They're not deprecating WSL1 yet. You can still use it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w...

But if you're looking for reasons, here are some officially stated ones. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-about

I/O performance and support for using Docker inside WSL seem like big ticket items. I'd agree with them that the trade-off of convenience sharing files between the two OSes for better support running Linux things in WSL is worth it.

I got tired of having to find patches/hacks/bespoke branches of tools I find interesting just to have them work in half-baked POSIX environments.

If they think Docker is more important than seamless desktop integration then obviously developers like myself are not as important to them as sysadmins who want to run docker services, I suppose.

I really, really want a proper and seamlessly integrated Linux environment on my Windows machine.

Linux desktop has the opposite problem: it's always been niche for mainstream users because its app ecosystem has never been good enough and it's often finicky to set up, even if its support for developers has been great.

They already admitted that they were wrong about Open Source and even though there is room for improvement, I'm happy that they are supporting power users more and more.

Go and look up how long it took one guy to create Unix.