Is this a necessary limitation of WSL?

I've been using Cygwin instead, so I can access Windows-native files using Linux-y tools.

You can use Windows versions of development tools (Java, Python, Node, etc) and you mix them with Cygwin. It's a bit of an unholy alliance but you can definitely develop a ton of stuff like this, I've done it for a decade.

You just need to figure out a bit of Cygwin-fu with cygpath & related tools, to smooth over the sharp areas occasionally.

Over time I found msys2 to be a better fit. In theory they're supposed to do different things, but msys2 with no cross compilation is basically cygwin but with a package manager you can use from the command line.

I wonder which VM based "shared files" is the fastest.

But usually you don't even have to because by default the wsl shell already puts you in /mnt/c/users/name and you'd just cd into Download

Early in my career I "ran Linux/BSD at home", so it was a natural transition to Windows + WSL.

And on Win11, WSLg gives you gvim as an easy option.

EDIT: But :) There are still plenty of Windows (specifically Win11) things that aggravate me still after so long.

I have SSH OTB (its OpenSSH after all), docker-desktop and vscode all outside WSL. Why would I use WSL with its vastly inferior shell ? Docker desktop sucked tho, but its now pretty hassle free.

What do you mean, its much more convenient to use virtual machine instead of real thing ?

In my experience, there's never a good time to update/reboot. I always have multiple applications and tabs open, and always several tasks in flight.

For many years, I had Windows set to not automatically update. Now, given the rapid speed with which vulnerabilities can be exploited, I'm personally glad that it does.

In a corporate environment, though, as the blog author is in, it's really going to be the IT policies that dictate this. They typically have the ability to update not just Windows, but any other software on the system. And often do.

That's one of the reasons that IT departments do prefer (and sometimes dictate) Windows -- It does make it easier for them to secure the multitude of systems for which they are responsible.

That said, I don't know of many third-party apps that require a reboot.