Microsoft

Hyper-V (Windows Hypervisor Platform) - Control hardware/BIOS/UEFI

• WSL 2 (a VM, with Virtual Machine Platform enabled)
• WSA (a VM, from Amazon Appstore installed from Microsoft Store)
• BlueStacks (has VM)
• Some others (have VM)
• Docker Desktop (has VM)
  • Docker containers

Oracle

VirtualBox - User mode (startable, stoppable), won't work if Hyper-V enabled

• Linux OSes (as VMs)
  • Docker containers

WSL 2 vs Linux in VirtualBox

• WSL 1 is almost complete Linux
• WSL 2 is complete Linux with some modifications
  • Nginx service can run inside
  • Some other services won't, eg. MongoDB
  • WSL shares ports with Windows, other services can be installed in Windows instead.