What is the advantage of using VMware Workstation Pro for this as opposed to using WSL2?

I think it has default access to your c drive via a mount, for one. You could add layers/sandboxes, but it’s not isolated.

Funny, but I wrote some environment initialization and setup scripts that you just unzip to a new dev desktop, and run the first powershell script, and it will work through (have to reboot after a couple installs), but it goes through, then once WSL is up, it'll rely on the /mnt/c/ paths to run bash scripts to initialize the wsl environment too... was pretty handy.

Yeah, I do most Linux stuff on Windows in containers using podman leveraging WSL2, but that's a good point.

I wouldn't put it past Opus 4.5 in yolo mode to vm escape if it felt like it haha

Stronger isolation and choice of OS

Windows has the WSL for native Linux vms, these days (and also the past ~decade)

I can rm -rf Windows files from WSL2. And so can LLMs.

Meanwhile a VM isolates by default.

You can turn all the interop and mounting of the windows FS with ease. I run claude in yolo mode using this exact setup. Just role out a new WSL env for each claude I want yoloing and away it goes. I suppose we could try to theorize how this is still dangerous buts its getting into extremely silly territory.

That's great to know! And important to clarify because by default WSL has access to all disks.