...or just run WSL2, which is absolutely amazing.

aeyes · on Nov 16, 2020

Shared filesystem performance on WSL2 is anything but amazing and pretty much everything I want it for depends heavily on the filesystem.

Native I/O performance is good but without shared files, WSL2 doesn't have any benefits over a VM.

3PS · on Nov 16, 2020

WSL2 has lots of benefits over a typical VM. It's a lot faster than your average type 2 VM (e.g. VirtualBox), it cold boots quickly, and you can run servers on localhost out of the box and access them through a regular Windows browser. I enjoy using it for Jupyter notebooks.

Plus WSL2 has way better tooling integration than most VMs - Windows Terminal, VSCode, etc. work well. I've found the experience compelling enough that I don't see much reason to dual boot Linux outside of CUDA applications (which are also supported now on Insiders.)

heavyset_go · on Nov 16, 2020

Linux got virtio-fs[1] capabilities as of Linux 5.4, and a driver for Windows guests was released recently. Along with VFIO passthrough, you can have accelerated and nearly native speed Windows guests on Linux if WSL2 isn't working out.

[1] https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/