I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.
The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.
What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.
I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.
> The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated.
The filesystem navigation getting partially open sourced is one of the more interesting parts being open sourced per this announcement. The Plan9 file server that serves files from Windows into Linux is included in the new open source dump. (The Windows filesystem driver that runs a Plan9 client on the Windows side to get files from Linux is not in the open source expansion.)
It's still fascinating that the whole thing is Plan9-based, given the OS never really succeeded, but apparently its network file system is a really good inter-compatibility file communication layer between Linux and Windows.
> I do wish that WSL1 was taken further.
WSL1 survives and there's still a chance it will see more work eventually, as the tides shift. I think the biggest thing that blocked WSL1 from more success was lack of partners and user interest in Windows Subsystem for Android apps. That still remains a potentially good idea for Windows if it had been allowed "real" access to Google Play Services and App Store, rather than second rate copy of Amazon's copy of Google Play Services and Fire App Store. An actual Google partnership seems doomed given one of the reasons to get Windows Subsystem for Android competitive was fear of ChromeOS, but Google still loves to talk about how "Open" Android is despite the Google Play Services moat and that still sounds like something that a court with enough fortitude could challenge (even if it is probably unlikely to happen).
I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.
The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.
What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.
I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.