IME most of the people who had a bad time with it either tried to treat it like a Win2k install or kept installing/uninstalling things (Vista rotted annoyingly fast if you were that sort of indecisive about your app loadouts).
Install firefox, set up a usable bash+X11 system (IIRC I used colinux and then cygwin), install two or three games, and then Do Not Touch The Configuration From Then On and it was just as reliable for me as Windows 10 is.
(in the sense that my only recurring problem in both cases was Intel Wifi drivers being stupid, everything else was the traditional Windows "it's a bit like training a brain-damaged hyena but if you know what you're doing it -stays- trained" experience ;)
That's fun. Now you'd use WSL.
I did use VMWare Workstation for a bit many years ago and more recently Hyper-V, but since the primary purpose of my X11 setup is ssh-ing to the dev rigs where I do my actual work, WSL2 absolutely wins out these days.
* under WSL1 I used a windows-side VcXsrv instance, but WSL2 being a Hyper-V slice means it has to do X11 over the (internal) network so if I need to restart network related stuff all my clients crashed; using RDP means I just have to reconnect the RDP client
[Makes note to self to check out this Alfred thing, it's been mentioned too many times on HN.]