WSL is inside Windows. I haven't found the need for anything like this on macOS, as it's Unix and I can just install stuff with Homebrew. When the Unix version of some package didn't do what something else I was running expected, I was able to install coreutils in just a few seconds and carry on.

It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?

WSL is 90% of a good product. They just quit improving it too early. Managing file permissions between Windows and WSL is a nightmare, it does horrific things to your filesystem if it ever runs out of memory, at least once every day a teammate is hitting a readonly filesystem issue. A team of some of the smartest people I know tried to smooth it over enough to be useful and we couldn’t do it.

At my bigco, we have all but given up on it and moved everyone to EC2 or Macs for non-Windows workloads.

No. I *don't want Windows*. WSL is not an option for me. In fact, Linux is the only option, and it's what I chose.

Thankfully AI nowadays does an amazing job in issue diagnostic and resolution, and even patches the kernel to make stuff work, so this is the viable solution.

But what is the point of WSL if you can get run the real thing, without performance penalty, bloatware and spyware? WinBoat makes more sense if there is the odd program that does not have a substitute.

Apple doesn't have to do anything because it's already unix

What are you talking about? The Mac platform is so much more friendly for doing Linux related work. First of all it’s Unix so most tooling has MacOS variants, and secondly you have a miriad way to install WSL like VMs with shared disk.