> "The user friendliness of Windows combined with the stability of Linux."
I think you meant: "The user friendliness of Linux combined with the stability of Linux."
You know, like when you're not forced to link your system to a Microsoft account. Or when you cannot reboot because a 30 minute update is pushed down your throat. Or when you cannot start working because an other 30 minute update is pushed down your throat at startup. Or when you have a 2 minute warning before a forced 1h update is pushed down your.. ..you get the picture. And the long, long list goes on.
If the time comes to discuss operating systems, I always suggest an exercise of downloading a Windows 11 Home ISO and installing it into a virtual machine, look at how much of it is installing an OS versus upselling into services using every dark pattern in the book. (With such hits as "the No button is hidden under a link-button called Learn More and only appears if you choose an advanced installation")
Once you're using it for >month, it's easy to see the BS as just an occasional inconvenience because saying yes is so much easier.
Also "you literally can't install without a Microsoft account unless you know the magic incantation to open the command prompt in the installer (Shift+F10) and the command MS provided for some reason to allow you to bypass connecting to the Internet ('OOBE\BypassNRO')".
My use case for WSL is really what original comment says: I need stability of windows so my graphics drivers won't stop working randomly and user friendliness of linux command line as a developer
My anecdatum: I once had a Windows machine that was frequently giving me the famous BSOD. Sometimes it would run for a few minutes, other times it would happen immediately on boot. Booting the same system in Linux would only produce some kernel errors, but the system kept running.
That's the kind of stability I need.
P.S.: Turns out the RAM was bad and replacing it fixed everything.
So you were just lucky and Linux didn't happen to allocate system / driver critical memory to your specific RAM's broken side and this sheer luck gets it a praise.
I had the opposite. I got a Thinkpad with a broken RAM IC. Windows was booting and working 99% normally with the desktop apps. However running a browser caused it to completely freeze. Linux didn't even boot. It didn't move past the early stage. So it is Linux' fault now?
I forgot to mention that the Linux kernel was printing warnings about the memory so it somehow knew something was wrong and was able to mitigate the damage.
So you were just "unlucky"? ;)
I won't claim to be an expert in either kernel but if you take both our cases (anecdatum) it seems that Linux is better at recognizing a problem and either mitigating it or failing hard. The latter sitatiion is much better than Windows just happily trying to use faulty hardware and rolling the dice. In my case, when running under Windows I was getting file corruption too.
My story is kind of old and so this was Windows 7, I think. Maybe Windows is better now.
In my experience Linux can have some driver bugs on specific hardware that windows doesn't, like not waking up after suspend on some Nvidia cards with some drivers, etc. But it handles hardware issues miles better.
90% of hard drives that windows does not detect Linux can detect and copy 99% of the data with some IO errors for the rest. Can handle hardware instability like bad rams or too high of an overclock for ages while windows crashes very easily.
Not really. It really is a linux kernel that uses the ancient windows (pre-95, or pre-NT) technique of "cooperative" multitasking. It works on everything. It's super efficient. However, one process fails (or just slows down) or corrupts memory and it takes your entire system (in this case all other linux processes) down with it.
I think you meant: "The user friendliness of Windows combined with the stability of Linux.".