(04-01-2021, 03:01 PM)jkl Wrote: Yet, indeed, it makes no sense to simulate other systems, just like it is pointless to use Wine.

Well... wine is an implementation of win32 api, it does not tries to implement or emulate windows's kernel at all. Also, the vast majority of programs on windows are not portable to linux, even for the open source ones. Programs on linux are mostly open source, mostly already ported on windows, and WSL tries to emulate linux, the kernel (from what I understand of wikipedia's article).

I clearly remember WSL1 being slow and buggy as hell. The article says "In benchmarks WSL 1's performance is often near native Linux Ubuntu, Debian [...] I/O is in some tests a bottleneck for WSL".
Well, now, what's the point in running linux softwares on windows, when they don't have IOs? There are many gratis linux distributions you can install in a VM or a cheap system. Basically, any old computer around will do.

Windows? Well, the free VM image they give for dev (which becomes unlicensed after few days) is a 20Gio binary. 20Gio. My current system, which is bloated and unclean, uses ~9.1Gio for /, 0.7Gio for /var, which gives for less than half. I have *games* installed there. One of my VMs for debian uses less than 900Mio.

WSL2, according to wikipedia, is a real VM, so we clearly enter the simulation/emulation area.

I'm pretty sure that if windows's API was clearly documented or simply open source, wine would be far more reliable and efficient than it is actually, and actually, it's able to run windows games, when WSL1 had troubles running a fucking terminal+shell...

I'm not saying it's a good idea to run programs through wine, but there are more reasons to do that than to use WSL. Basically, I see WSL as either a toy or a tool for people which must deal with a BOFH.