Why not just use Linux then?

The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.

People like to talk like GPL is evil, but it's underpinning more of the world than many people see.

And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).

I wouldn’t call the GPL “evil”, but I do think it’s more unrealistic given current western economics and mooching practices. Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.

Nothing prevents one from selling GPL'd software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Despite the FSF's word games with "copyleft", the GNU GPL, Creative Commons, and F/OSS licenses rely on legal copyright protections in order to work. It's the copyright holder who reserves the right to license the software by those terms.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#is-creative-commons-against...

Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.

> Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.

While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.

Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).

For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.

On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.

So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.

Sure, but consider that some people might not be able to just make that choice in any given context.

I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).

So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.

Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.

I completely agree with you. WSL2 can be useful for many scenarios at its current form.

We tend to forget that "Horses for Courses" and "Your Mileage May Vary" applies way broader than we think.

The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly.

But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).

That's another sound option, but as a person who doesn't like Homebrew and stuffing /usr/local with tons of things, a lightweight Linux VM becomes mandatory after some point on macOS, too.

Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.

Homebrew on arm64 installs to /opt/homebrew.

Oh. They changed it at last? This is good news. Thanks for letting me know.

Yup absolutely.

I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.

Current macos is going the windows direction with some architecture choice (default uninstallable software, settings panel mess, meaningless updates,…)

>Why not just use Linux then?

Why not both? Like me?

I sometimes say, tongue in cheek slightly, that the best Linux desktop is Windows.

> I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine

It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.

However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.

>But WSL2 is freaking incredible

It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.

Or just go straight to Hyper-V, without all the WSL stuff.

Hyper-V for a cheap solution.

But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).

One thing that I notice nobody mention about VMWare on Windows is what about the issues with "Virtualization Based Security"? If you have this enabled VMWare uses "Windows Hypervisor Platform" which I think is also tied in with Hyper-V for running VMs through VMware making them noticeably worse and more unstable especially when dealing with USB devices. During the installer, you'll be warned of this too if memory serves correct. Cons are you cannot use WSL2 and reduced security. How much in reality does it reduce security I'm not exactly sure but I wish it wasn't like this or there was a better workaround for VMware on Windows. VBS feature is enabled by default on all Windows 11 and I think most later releases of Windows 10.

The Windows Hypervisor does suck in terms of an actual virtualization features, but it does reduce security significantly by disabling it. It’s a big front line defense against memory attacks.