I using and deploying to kubernetes. Nerdctl has a docker API but it’s completely backed by k8s. So, for regular dev I’d just need a k8s cluster and not k8s + something else to build the images and push them into the k8s image repository.

WSL2 is Linux on a virtual machine. Docker for Windows is running in a VM.

I’m also a weirdo though, I’m using podman instead (and may switch to nerdctl).