WSL for me was literally a gateway drug to switching fully to Linux. It did work, but took extra system memory, drained battery life, and caused intermittent suspend/resume issues. Just not worth dealing with compared to running native Linux.

WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS. And it’s supported by MS, not a community add-on.

People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…

Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.

> WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS.

They must have made major improvements since the last time I used it then, because filesystem issues was the #1 reason I moved away from WSL

macOS and Linux are both POSIX-compatible operating systems. I guess I’m unclear on why you’d need to run a Linux VM with full filesystem access, when the tools can be installed on macOS itself the filesystem is just the filesystem. It seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity for most standard use cases.

You’re responding to a thread where op literally said they only want Linux and telling them they shouldn’t want Linux. Why even respond to the thread?

Nobody is confused about what macos is in 2026, this isn’t about education, it’s about preference.

I wouldn't call it seamless. Zero-configuration, yes, but performance issues make it impossible to do many things across the FS boundary in practice.

I run Linux in Lima VMs regularly on macOS for development, and I find that it works very well in practice despite not being first-party.