Doesn't work well with web dev ecosystem

[ggolda]

Hi! I'm WSL1 user for ~2 years already and pretty happy with it (if we don't count file system performance). Recently I decided to try WSL2 once again (tried it long time ago after it was released via Windows Insider Program) and here is my review. Hope it will provide you some insights of how this tool is used, problems that I faced and prevent other people from wasting several hours trying to configure WSL2 😃.

Main issue that prevents me from using WSL2 is that it doesn't work with Vagrant and Virtualbox. I'm a php/laravel developer and Vagrant is still the main tool that I use daily. I tried using latest Vagrant, Virtualbox and etc versions to reproduce my current workflow but after solving one problem after another I just gave up:

1. Sync folders doesn't work with Virtualbox if files are stored inside WSL2. The only solution to this is to move everything to a windows drive and in this case WSL2 have even worse fs performance than WSL1. Without this vagrant/virtualbox is unusable for me.
2. In WSL2 you need to install Vagrant both in WSL and in Windows environment and proxy commands via ENV variables. It doesn't break anything but just an extra clunky step that you have to take.
3. Not possible to assign static IP address to Hyper-V vm. You can work around this by installing extra vagrant plugin.
4. Vagrant/Hyper-V without VirtualBox throws errors that can be solved by following this long guide: https://gist.github.com/savishy/8ed40cd8692e295d64f45e299c2b83c9

So after spending several hours trying to setup all of this and fixing problems, I still haven't succeeded and just gave up. I understand that most of those issues are related to third-party tools, but they are still incredibly popular among web developers (e.g. Laravel Homestead which is a recommended way to developer in laravel). Since it was your decision to use Hyper-V that prevents us from using lvl 2 virtualization tools it would be great if you communicate with third-party tools developers and Hyper-V team to resolve those issues and make web development in WSL2 possible.

[ggolda]

Worst part that first look at WSL2 documentation tells that it plays nicely with Vagrant/Virtualbox but it doesn't say anything that you can not share folders between them. Probably it's worth updating documentation to specify this because it's not possible to use them for web development without folders sync.