I will start by saying I haven't used Windows as my full time desktop in 20 years. I did use VS/Windows for 2 years while I did a C# project in 2013-2014, managed a bunch of windows servers, used (and liked) powershell, everything, but that was inside a VM on my mac. And the other two windows full-time devs I was helping had never used linux or WSL (and one of them was not terribly keen on the whole idea). But we were all new to WSL. I knew WSL was very easy, and even many devs at MS use it.

So to provide more detail, things were slowed down further because this was one of those teams meetings where you can't just take over, but have to tell someone to type another command and wait for them to type it. The second thing was that the user didn't tell me that they were switching to another user when escalating to admin (cuz I couldn't see that elevated system dialog in the screen share). So it turned out they had installed WSL as a different admin user, so when they went to \\WSL$ (as their original user), it wasn't showing any shares. That set off a lot of googling and claude'ing that went nowhere.

Suffice to say I was ready to end the day after that meeting :-)

A red flag early on was when a bun install took 8 mins when trying to run it on /mnt/c, when it took 200ms on my machine. So I knew there had to be some weird filesystem overhead stuff going on. So then when we got it working beautifully by just using the VM's filesystem, I was personally happy with it but the person on the other end felt this was all too cumbersome and was soured on WSL, even though I tried to explain the differences.

I kept thinking that WSL was the greatest thing since sliced bread and got the message that MS had found a way to make them work beautifully together (especially in WSL2). I'm sure I could've figured this all out on my machine in probably 10 mins.