I would like to use Windows as rarely as possible and I think WSL 2 doesn't allow that.

While I agree, that doesn’t mean that dual booting is the solution. My daily is Fedora Workstation and I have a Windows vm for stuff as needed.

I mean you have to run Windows as your host system. Personally I would consider this a major drawback which more than eclipses any convenience gains.

I guess I should have been more verbose in my original comment. Windows is hot garbage, but there hardly exists a good reason for dual booting. Use a Windows VM from Linux if you can, WSL2 from Windows if you must.

Why? It works great. Or is it just personal preference?

Mostly preference. I don't like Windows' approach to telemetry, and intrusive UI patterns.

Which intrusive UI patterns?

Candy Crush ads in the start menu.

Right click. Remove. Done. No more ads.

Why should I have to do that?

Perhaps because you don't like Candy Crush?

No I mean why should my OS (which I paid for) come pre-installed with garbage ware?

I am considering building a PC for programming and am genuinely curious if WSL2 can be considered a replacement for dual booting Linux and Windows? I am currently rocking a dual boot system (with legacy bios) and haven't had any issues so far.

It's pretty close. Big pain point for me still is that running an IDE from Windows and accessing the Linux FS is not quite as snappy as native-Linux (I use IntelliJ). So for now I still dual-boot.

This is apparently being worked on... in the future I will be able to run the IDE inside WSL and it will bridge X11/Wayland to Windows.

If you can try using Visual Studio Code, with their remote plugins. One of the remote plugins is for wsl2 and it works great.

That means that VSC installs language server inside the wsl2 environment, I use it at home for my rust/python development and can't tell the difference.

I gave up on dual-booting a long time ago and 2 OSes fighting over overwriting the MBR every time I wanted to upgrade one or the other. It's just so much easier to maintain 2 machines.

I solved for this by simply giving Windows and Linux a hard drive each. The boot records are completely separate, and neither one tries to read data from the other. (Personally I have no need, my NAS handles any file level syncing, but that's minimal anyway.) Both Windows and the Linux boot are registered in UEFI, so I asked my BIOS to disable the hard drive preference and pop up the boot menu each time, letting me pick which OS to use manually.

> I gave up on dual-booting a long time ago and 2 OSes fighting over overwriting the MBR every time

This is why UEFI was invented, and if You actually read the post, you would know it details how you set this up with UEFI instead of legacy boot and have none of those troubles.

Isn't WSL2 a step backwards from WSL? A thinly veiled VM, vs. proper Linux emulation? What's the performance story and cross-execution (starting Windows programs from Linux side, or vice versa) on WSL2 now?

The interoperability is good except few applications.

File performance is similar to native as long as you store the files in WSL2.

Only issue, I have faced is that port forwarding does not work sometimes and have to restart WSL2 for fix which I solved using a simple script.

Other than that everything has been a smooth sail. Native docker is a huge win in my list.

The randomly assigned ip every reboot is extremely annoying.

I use localhost for accessing stuff inside and outside the WSL2 and it works fine for me.

I never used the private ip. So, I can't say anything.