For context (since someone on Reddit incorrectly objected to this meme): The original Expanding Brain was sarcastic in that bigger brains represented worse options.
Yo! What’s wrong with wsl?
The linux community sees wsl as eee
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
It was an internal Microsoft term for bringing stuff under their umbrella
WSL has worked perfectly for my use case of “I need Linux to interact with the cluster I work on at school but I don’t have the time to maintain the hobbyist OS on my personal computers”
For what it’s worth, a chromebook using crouton to dualboot xfce was also good enough for what I needed, so I’m not exactly a power user
My use case isn’t too complicated, so your mileage may vary, but from my experience of using distros like Fedora (though I hesitate to recommend it due to Red Hat’s recent bullshit), it is no less usable than Windows (and it runs faster too, partly thanks to the evident lack of spyware). From what I’ve heard, games without egregious anticheat works fine under Proton as well. You could always set up a Windows VM inside Linux too (Chris Titus has some excellent guides on setting up QEMU/KVM) if you need to but I never needed to so far. Tldr, Linux is as simple or complex as you need to be.
People just love to hate on windows, there doesn’t actually need to be a reason.
Windows is spyware that you pay for, and that’s reason enough for me. I hate Google too, but I have to at least admit that they at least give you pretty good free stuff in exchange for being spyware (at least that was the case the last time I used any of their products anyways, been quite a while since and given the current enshittification of many big tech platforms, wouldn’t be all too surprised if they followed suit).
Better add another panel for “using WSL2 in a Windows VM on Linux”