WSL2 works seamlessly within the same OS that transparently handles managing the VM. It's better integrated where I use shell scripts in dev projects built using Win dev tools, have both Win command-line and bash open in Windows Terminal, JetBrains IDEs or VS Code. VS Code and Jet Brains also lets you seamlessly open projects in WSL and build with Linux tools, needed for our Ruby Jekyll site.

Seamless cross-system access to files and programs.

Show me a VM that allows me to access the entire host and client filesystem seamlessly without barriers.

WSL allow you to do just that and for that alone it's very useful. You can automate tasks using Windows-only software (compilers, etc.) with Linux userland tools and run both Linux and Windows software without resorting to Wine or similar translation layers that come with their own quirks and drawbacks.

Want to test whether your software package works on Linux as well? No problem, just open a terminal and compile on Linux in the same file system without having to deal with shared folders and configurations.

That's the major selling point for me.

> without having to deal with shared folders and configurations.

Does that work that easily on WSL2? I thought that was mostly a WSL1 things, and thus I have not upgraded yet.

WSL2 can still communicate across file-systems, though it's not particularly advised. For that specific task WSL1 is probably faster.

Its fine for most day to day tasks, for example I have a simple "~/d" symlink to my windows "Downloads" folder that I can use to fetch files I've downloaded in windows Chrome.

It's serviceable for one-offs, but you can't do any really high throughput stuff with that since it's going through a network protocol. For example you really need to keep your git repos on the WSL fs, rather than in the Windows tree. The upside is that they thought about it and Visual Code integration is seamless.

Luckily most of my is pretty segregated - either its all on Linux or all on Windows.

One killer feature is WSL2 can run windows binaries.

I've made an "open" alias to emulate the mac behavour, eg. you run "open fred.docx" inside WSL2 and it will open the document in word.

I've also made a "pbcopy" clone, and have a bunch of other scripts that simplify mundane tasks.

It's the same thing but : cheaper, faster, easier.