It's a separate filesystem, but from WSL you can access Windows files in mounted drives via the `/mnt/<drive letter>` directory.

And vice versa: linux home dir is at something like \\wsl$\ubuntu\home\username

Yes, there is a separate filesystem for WSL, but you can still traverse the Windows filesystem as well, including mounting external drives. You can also browse the linux filesystem from windows explorer as expectded.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/access-linux-file...

https://community.openbiox.org/d/72-windows-subsystem-for-li...

It's the same filesystem with some kind of translation/adapter. I love it because it makes supporting our multi-platform OSS projects easy.

You do have the occasional issues regards line endings; that's the only negative I've had so far.

EDIT: H12 is more accurate. The Linux OS is separate, but the Windows FS is mounted to a logical place and "just works".

Yes line endings for configuration files was one of the issues we ran into