Yes, set up a VM and then add 3 levels of nested containers inside the VM just to be sure.
Incidentally next week I have to debug one of our tester's laptop - he installed vmware which stopped WSL from running somehow and now neither option works.
You hit an important point here. Teaching IT to 16 jear old children is very much like being an admin for a large corporation. Most of them have installed VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and pfSense, depending on the preference of the other teachers.
Most first-graders don't know anything about networking, so I didn't want to add WSL to that. I used Cygwin. Worked perfectly until I started to teach Sendmail. Sendmail runs in unprivileged mode. This means that it starts as root, but then switches to a user with very few rights. Cygwin couldn't handle that at first, but I got it working. But then students couldn't uninstall Cygwin anymore because of changed file ownership in Windows. I had to install a second Cygwin to uninstall the first.
With MinC I took extreme care to get all the different models of Access Control Lists that are used in Windows right.
yes but you get what you pay for, a real linux environment that you can install any tool. Vmware is kinda problematic as I observe on my windows 11. And I had problems with hyperv . Even for wsl2 i had to do reinstalls till I get it working but now it is pretty cool.
It takes around 5-6 seconds for initial vm startup. If you close the terminal the vm shuts down in a couple of minutes. But if you want it always up, I use the tmux trick to make it always stay up.
Incidentally next week I have to debug one of our tester's laptop - he installed vmware which stopped WSL from running somehow and now neither option works.