On: My favorite device is a Chromebook

[sedatk]

What do you mean by not in the same league? You only mentioned running GUI apps, and WSL2 can do that fine.

[consteval → sedatk]

Well, for starters, you get hardware acceleration and device pass through. So you can use your webcam and stuff under linux and you get animations, smooth video playback, etc.

Also you can access your linux files directly from chrome os, and vice versa.

[sedatk → consteval]

WSL can do hardware acceleration (for video too), and supports GPU passthrough so Linux CUDA apps can run fine. You can also use your USB devices.

You can access your Linux files from Windows easily too. They are under \\wsl$\distroname\…

[sedatk → sedatk]

(and vice versa of course, through /mnt/c /mnt/d etc)