I do have to wonder how he ever got through his doctorate. Reading is like the second most important skill for physicists, and writing isn’t too far down the list either. Maybe it’s different for mathematicians and/or other stem fields, but unless he’s a super-genius, he’d be confronted to the need to read articles/material at some point, no?

You can cap the amount of cpu/memory docker is allowed to use. That helps a lot for those issues in my experience, although it still takes somewhat beefy machines to run docker in wsl