My best choice was going back to Linux. Everything is simple and fast. It's difficult to say if this improves my efficiency, but I feel a lot better.

Do yourself a favor. Go for the real thing, don't accept poor substitutes.

What is not “real Linux” about WSL?

* You can't run your distro of choice unless you build it yourself

* Lots of programs don't work properly (citation needed, can't remember specifics)

* You can only run command line programs, although I understand this could be different in Windows 11

My last job mandated windows laptops so I used WSL for a couple of months before I got too frustrated and just ran a virtualbox VM.

WSLg solves this, apparently

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg