It feels a lot more like a dual os system than just running a vm inside of windows. The integration between the two is pretty seamless and powerful. e.g. this is in my wsl .bashrc file, it writes to my windows clipboard by running the powershell.exe windows executeable:

  function cb () {
     powershell.exe -command "\$input | set-clipboard"
  }

Mac is unix sure, but they have diverged from the popular main stream linux distributions and you still need to learn various gotchas and different ways of doing things. At least for me, our deployment environment is amazon linux 2 and I use amazon linux 2 for wsl. I am also an sre, so maybe that matters to me more than most and unix is good enough for most.

I like named volumes to be honest. They just should be able to have more than one letter, like Netware and Amiga had.

> it has a decent CLI half baked in with a number of weird ass exceptions that punch you in the face regularly.

Tell me you haven't used WSL without telling me you haven't used WSL.

BSD.ude