WSL1 was very conceptually appealing, and ended up working very poorly because of the poor matching between Linux syscalls and the Windows kernel. Git suffered terribly as a result. The inverse is also somewhat true - there have been cases where Wine is much slower than native Windows because Linux simply doesn't provide a simple way to achieve the same outcome, and interestingly the Wine developers have had reasonable (if tediously slow) success in making it possible to express the same semantics to Linux and have it handle things fast. It would be fascinating to know whether WSL1 developers didn't have enough traction to get Windows internals altered to match, or whether it's just way harder to do the same under Windows.

Back in my day you to to download a couple GB worth of cygwin, and that wasn't an actual environment, basically just a GNU toolchain compiled for windows. But it got you like....grep and bash and stuff that ran natively on windows which was kinda cool.

It was soooo slow though. Practically unusable for anything i/o heavy.