https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/virtualization/hyper-...
Are you sure about this? It seems unlikely that NT would change significantly depending on whether or not it is hosting a WSL2 guest. I've never noticed anything different about my Windows since using WSL2.
> Windows filesystem from WSL2 and vice versa
/mnt/C/
\\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu
But yes, everything I've read and experienced indicates that:
1. WSL2 IS a VM and it necessitates installation of certain portions of Hyper-V, which as Type-1 hypervisor, means your primary windows partition is no longer bare-metal but rather now a parent virtual machine.
2. This has impact on running other Type 2 hypervisors such as VirtualBox or VMWare etc; as well as some types of performance-intensive applications and games.
They’re also doing the same for Windows 11 by default now too I believe.
> In addition, if you have Hyper-V enabled, those latency-sensitive, high-precision applications may also have issues running in the host. This is because with virtualization enabled, the host OS also runs on top of the Hyper-V virtualization layer, just as guest operating systems do.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-w...
1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq
"The newest version of WSL uses Hyper-V architecture to enable its virtualization"
A little bit of detail on impact, but incomplete/generic.
2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...
"Hyper-V features a Type 1 hypervisor-based architecture. "
Has some basic info, worth a read.
> In addition, if you have Hyper-V enabled, those latency-sensitive, high-precision applications may also have issues running in the host. This is because with virtualization enabled, the host OS also runs on top of the Hyper-V virtualization layer, just as guest operating systems do.
1. Isn't WSL2 now actually a VM too? My biggest deal breaker with WSL2 is that it moves my main Windows into now a parent VM over the Type 1 hypervisor; making everything else in my main Windows just that little bit wonkier. Worse, this information isn't as readily easily grokkable as I feel it should be. I.e. if somebody isn't comfortable installing a clean, separate VM in Virtualbox, they may be even less aware of consequences of moving their main Windows installation into a VM now.
2.Re fiddliness: Installing Ubuntu into VIrtualbox has always seemed trivially easy; and there's any number of downloadable pre-built images from safe sources. Whereas figuring out how to access Windows filesystem from WSL2 and vice versa; let alone installing GUI tools - always seemed completely opaque to me with any number of half-built, quarter-supported guides and solutions out there. And I never seem to know or guess correctly what subset of Linux functionality will or will not work, normally or differently.