I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly better than hoary old cygwin. This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux experience. The documentation didn't say anything about complications from attempting this, so a l…
Wasn't the main purpose of WSL2 to make WSL finally usable because before v2 it had really bad IO perf?
The problem is software that is badly written and does bad assumptions, like that continuing opening/closing files is good just because in Linux is good, that maybe true on most UNIX systems but nobody said that.
I think that WSL2 is a very very bad idea, you are no longer making a POSIX subsystem of Windows, a way to use the POSIX API in the Windows kernel, without any emulation (basically the same thing as WINE), you are running a virtual machine.
I would say that WSL2 performance is very bad if you work in the Windows filesystem. Sure, if you work from the WSL home directory that is mounted in a ext4 virtual filesystem performance is good, it's a VM.
But this is useless, you see the main advantage of WSL over having a VM or a dual boot was integration with Windows, the ability to use bash scripts to manipulate your Windows files, the ability to launch Windows executables and pipe the output into a POSIX executable.
All of that is useful if there is a strong connections between the two systems, if I can work with WSL in the same home directory as Windows where I have all my files. How is useful if before working on something (that could be a stupid thing like running a script to rename a bunch of files) I have to first copy the files that I intend to work on in the WSL home, run what I have to turn, and copy them back? And what if I want my IDE in execution in Windows with the project in Windows and I want to launch on the project bash scripts?
I hope they will not discontinue WSL1! If they will discontinue WSL1, unfortunately I will have to go back to cygwin that was not great but worked mostly fine, since I need integration between Windows and Linux.