Watched an expat video on youtube recently where he said he would never go back to America because the legal system is effectively lawless. Reading things like this, and others, makes me agree. There is this idea in America that countries with Civil Law systems instead of Common Law are more dangerous, but are they really more dangerous than "the law doesn't actually mean what it says, it means what this judge said 80 years ago it says"? The financial asymmetry just makes it worse, wealthy people and entities can very easily lawfare their enemies out of existence.
>and I haven't yet once had it make a disastrous one
I've had it make some pretty bad ones. Not directly hooked in to my terminal, just copy and paste. A couple of git doozies that lost my work, but I've done those too. Others more subtle, one of note is a ZFS ZPOOL creation script it gave me used classic linux style /dev/sda style drive identifiers instead of proper /dev/by-id paths which led to the disks being marked as failed every time I rebooted. Sure, that's on me for not verifying, but I was a little out of my depth with ZFS on Linux and thought that ZFS' own internal uuid scheme was handling it.
It can also be different within the same university, by department. I graduated from a university with a highly ranked and research oriented engineering department. I started in computer engineering which was in the college of engineering but ended up switching to computer science which was in the college of arts and sciences. The difference in the teachers and classroom experience was remarkable. It definitely seemed like the professors in the CS department actually wanted to teach and actually enjoyed teaching as compared to the engineering professors who treated it like it was wasting their time and expected you to learn everything from the book and their half-assed bullet point one way lectures. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your view, it also meant having to take more traditional liberal arts type electives in order to graduate.
For larger orgs and enterprises, it is Active Directory/Entra. That is the true Microsoft killer app and lock-in driver. There is no comparable Linux solution that I am aware of.
It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).
One thing that I notice nobody mention about VMWare on Windows is what about the issues with "Virtualization Based Security"? If you have this enabled VMWare uses "Windows Hypervisor Platform" which I think is also tied in with Hyper-V for running VMs through VMware making them noticeably worse and more unstable especially when dealing with USB devices. During the installer, you'll be warned of this too if memory serves correct. Cons are you cannot use WSL2 and reduced security. How much in reality does it reduce security I'm not exactly sure but I wish it wasn't like this or there was a better workaround for VMware on Windows. VBS feature is enabled by default on all Windows 11 and I think most later releases of Windows 10.
The Windows Hypervisor does suck in terms of an actual virtualization features, but it does reduce security significantly by disabling it. It’s a big front line defense against memory attacks.
Especially by land. I've walked into Mexico at an official crossing with zero passport / papers check by either side. In general land and sea travel can have differing rules though, where international air travel is governed by a set of international agreements with standard rules. For instance the full passport book is required for all international air travel.
You will get your docs checked about 10 miles inland Mexico. There you will go through customs and immigration. The border zone is treated differently in Mexico. Mexican customs is very strict: two laptops and you’re taxed 25% on the second one. Technically you can’t bring an iPad and a laptop without paying taxes.
My experience was that the Linux VM agents used to cause frequent problems but in the time I was using Azure I did see great improvements in them, kudos for that. I'd like to see less churn and breaking changes in agents and in Azure in general, but that seems to be a problem common to all major clouds.
