I have not been able to get any GUI apps to work, so if I want to do anything in a Linux environment, it had to be through the terminal. This is not often, there's not a lot of places where you NEED a GUI app and you NEED it be running on Linux APIs, but I encounter it often enough as a developer that it's incredibly annoying to find workarounds. Luckily I don't develop the GUI apps themselves, otherwise I think I would be forced to do my development in one OS or the other, and I bet you my employer would make us stay on Windows so we'd have to drop Linux support entirely since we would never be able to test it. Again, luckily I'm not in that situation and I can use WSL for development. But that is just one example of WSL not necessarily being bad, but just "not good enough".

Networking is another example. I messed with the settings once to try and get some port forwarding working on an app that was running in the background in WSL, and first of the whole running in the background thing was not working, but importantly I have no clue how in the world it was trying to link up with the outside world. There's NAT, and there's bridge mode. Those are the two modes you should need to use for a general-purpose VM. You should never need to do anything fancy like they do on server hypervisors, but for some reason WSL has this weird "mirrored" networking that somehow never works when it supposedly only is a one-line setting in a configuration file. Of course I can't troubleshoot it because I don't even understand what it's doing under the hood. Unfortunately, any other mode seems to require a lot more configuration and everything I've read online says mirrored mode will work great, but it just doesn't. Worst part is, I tried to switch back to NAT while I was working on something else and I simply lost internet connection. Now WSL just can't connect to any other devices, period. I had to reinstall it to fix the problem, and that meant moving all my uncommitted changes in my working tree over to Windows while I reinstalled because I couldn't sync my git repos since there was no internet. A vicious cycle, indeed. It works now, but I am never touching the networking seeings again.

Connectivity with external devices such as USBs is also a hassle. It's not impossible, and I didn't run into any problems doing it, but it's not exactly a piece of cake, either. Every time you want to use a new USB device with WSL, you have to open an administrator terminal on Windows and use a third party utility called "usbipd" to share the device with WSL. This is the official Microsoft supported way of doing it. It's just slightly annoying, and it relies on a tool that (although it is a well made tool and I do really like it for what it is) is not built into the system and has to be installed separately. It introduces friction that would be hard to script away, and anyways I don't want to create a script to do it, I want the functionality to be baked in and not require hacked together scripts in order to work. The only place I should be using scripts is in development. Maybe a real server administrator disagrees with me here and yeah, I get it, scripts are used everywhere in the real world, but from a software design standpoint it would be better if the apps just talked to each other already without any script to help.

Ok, enough of my ranting. To conclude, yeah I still use WSL, and yeah it's better than any other VM almost entirely because of its good performance as it is running on a level 1 hypervisor, but I would immediately switch to just running desktop Linux if I could. I already have on all my home devices, and it is so much better. I might not have all the fancy professional Windows apps, but they has never held me back. It's certainly not worth it to go back if I had to start using WSL at home, too. But yeah: WSL is not bad, but it needs a lot of work before it becomes suitable for general-purpose use such as running Linux GUI applications.