This is pretty common. They turned off hyper-v.

Thanks, I'll check that when the easter some-people-took-more-time-off period is over.

You hit an important point here. Teaching IT to 16 jear old children is very much like being an admin for a large corporation. Most of them have installed VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and pfSense, depending on the preference of the other teachers. Most first-graders don't know anything about networking, so I didn't want to add WSL to that. I used Cygwin. Worked perfectly until I started to teach Sendmail. Sendmail runs in unprivileged mode. This means that it starts as root, but then switches to a user with very few rights. Cygwin couldn't handle that at first, but I got it working. But then students couldn't uninstall Cygwin anymore because of changed file ownership in Windows. I had to install a second Cygwin to uninstall the first. With MinC I took extreme care to get all the different models of Access Control Lists that are used in Windows right.

wait, first graders?!?

He said 16 year old. I was installing Slackware from floppies at 16 so why wouldn't modern kids play with VMs?

yes but you get what you pay for, a real linux environment that you can install any tool. Vmware is kinda problematic as I observe on my windows 11. And I had problems with hyperv . Even for wsl2 i had to do reinstalls till I get it working but now it is pretty cool. It takes around 5-6 seconds for initial vm startup. If you close the terminal the vm shuts down in a couple of minutes. But if you want it always up, I use the tmux trick to make it always stay up.