This is fundamentally the wrong direction to go.<p>The clue is that MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware. The way forward is to boot Linux, or even something else, to manage hardware, memory, and filesystems, and cut down MSWin to run in a container on it. That way MSWin relies on the underlying OS to do things MSWin has proven to be just not very good at. MSWin runs programs written for it, reliably the same as non-hosted MSW, but is not subject to randomizing effects of manufacturers' drivers and MS's historically poor buffer and process management.<p>If you want MSWin to manage the screen, it can provide a way for an underlying OS program to work in a window it provides, and connect UI and clipboard events back to it. But MSWin is not really so great at display management, either, so it might be better for the underlying OS to manage that, too, as is done with VMs on X today.
I'm a paying customer that's been running my main dev system on WSL and Pengwin for four months now. I've got it on my ThinkPad and my beefy desktop and sync the two environments using .dotfiles. There is a bit of an I/O slowdown compared to native (most noticable when npm installing a billion tiny modules), but generally everything is quite functional. No driver issues as when I've run Linux. No terrible Mac keyboard. I run VSCode under WSL to keep my dev toolchain on the Linux side. The main thing that forces me to dual boot to Ubuntu is CUDA development, but I find that most of this sort of work has shifted to Jupyter Notebook.
Can someone please enumerate how this is different from Ubuntu 18.04 (from Canonical) on WSL? Other than distro differences, I see a LOT of marketing speak in the Github ReadMe, but I can't tell if they really offer any advantage over competing offerings.
Interesting:<p>“Grants/Bounties<p>If you have an idea for a new feature you would like to see implemented in Pengwin and can implement it yourself given the funding, we are now accepting grant/bounty proposals. Grants are currently available for $50-$500 USD based on complexity.”<p>The upper limit is quite demotivating, from my point of view.
Is WSL multithreaded? I love the ease of use that WSL gives, but it seems slow to cygwin on disk access. I think this is planned in a future fox by making the WSL directory to the disk instead of in a container file. I went back to cygwin for faster speed of scripts processing files.
Started using this yesterday, with the X410 X11 install.<p>The nicest thing has to be running IntelliJ from X11 and have it see the linux filesystem.<p>I can run a Yubikey with weasel-pageant and get GPG signing and SSH keychain access to github through it -- it pops up a Windows PIN entry dialog box and then works fine thereafter. You can use wslutilities (wslusc) to set up windows shortcuts to your Linux applications. I use ConEmu as my shell and it's fine.<p>There is a problem with HiDPI screens. I've worked around this by increasing the font size in IntelliJ, but VS Code shows up as teensy tiny.<p>The worst part has to be the documentation. The docs for "pengwin-setup" is basically a bunch of screenshots on their blog.
Is this actually a <i>Linux</i> distro, though? I've long held that "WSL" is a misnomer; it happens to be compatible with binaries compiled for Linux, but given that no Linux code is actually present, this would really be Debian GNU/NT.
I'm so confused right now. I looked at the various links and cant believe I still can't figure this out. The kernel is windows or linux? How do I get or run this? I install windows and then this? Someone help me out here!