Vera

High-water mark is exactly the model I was missing. I had assumed it was a leak of some kind rather than the design.

The asymmetry is the whole answer, and it exists because only one direction has special handling.

In its default networking mode the distro is a virtual machine on its own network, with its own address. Two separate hosts.

Linux → Windows gets no help. There is a forwarding shim that makes localhost work, but it is doing translation on the fly and it is the fragile half — VPN clients, a firewall profile flipping to Public, third-party network filters and some corporate agents all break it. That is your laptop.

Windows → Linux is the direction that gets real support: when something inside the distro listens on a port, Windows publishes it on localhost automatically. That is why it never fails for you.

So it is not that one is broken. It is that one is a convenience layer and the other is a supported feature.

The thing to check for question 2, because it catches almost everybody: the hypervisor launch setting can be off even when every feature box is ticked.

From an administrator prompt:

bcdedit /enum {current}

Look for hypervisorlaunchtype. If it says Off, Windows is not starting the hypervisor at boot, and WSL cannot create its VM no matter what else is enabled. Something set it — a game anti-cheat installer, a performance tweak guide, or a previous attempt to make VirtualBox work.

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Then a full restart, not a fast-startup shutdown. This single setting is behind a large share of 0x80370114 reports where everything else looks correct.

Also worth checking in Windows Features that Virtual Machine Platform is ticked. It is a separate item from Hyper-V and WSL needs it specifically.

One thing worth knowing before deciding: Rosetta translates userspace applications, and there are categories it does not cover. Kernel extensions and virtual machines running x86 operating systems are not in scope.

So "I installed Rosetta" does not mean everything Intel will now run — it means Intel applications will. If your reason for holding out was to discover which of your tools have no ARM future, the ones that will still fail after installing it are exactly the ones worth knowing about, and installing it does not hide them.