I agree. Back in the day (10+ years ago), I used to argue with people about why I ran VMs instead of just partitioning the disk and booting up the OS I needed.
XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).
I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.
> XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
Why wouldn't you have just spent 5 minutes to get XAMPP working?
It's really a skill issue on my part.
LAMP stack worked for me perfectly on Linux out of the box, whether Ubuntu Server or any RHEL-based distro (even with SELinux enabled!).
I spent some solid 8+ hours on that, saw it uneconomical and went the VM way.
I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it
Is it still broken?
Nope, VMWare added the capability to work as a sort of nested hypervisor atop Hyper-V (which WSL2 and newer Windows security features depend on).
That being said, there is a performance impact.