Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

&gt; That’s because with this feature we are automatically starting a companion system distro, containing a Wayland, X server, pulse audio server, and everything else needed to make Linux GUI apps communicate with Windows.<p>You see me impressed. Especially as they are supporting Wayland. Now please make electron apps non-blurry on Wayland

So now developers can stop writing apps for Windows. Instead, they can write for Linux and distribute on Windows using WSL.<p>Thanks Microsoft!

If you thought electron apps used a lot of memory, this thing will surprise you [0]:<p>With WSL2, apps will now use either 50% or 8GB of your available memory.<p>Happy coding!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;WSL&#x2F;issues&#x2F;4166" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;WSL&#x2F;issues&#x2F;4166</a>

Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but after testing Steam on Linux, which promised a good coverage [1][2], i&#x27;m more and more feeling like replacing the only left Windows device with linux. The only thing that would make sense for me, is that microsoft should port their UI to linux and handle their backwards compability with wine.<p>I mean, what is the benefit of keeping their own kernel, when obviously they understand that another kernel and userspace is more and more important, and even used by them selfs.<p>1: Protondb: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protondb.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protondb.com&#x2F;</a> 2: ProtonDB Discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25333219" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25333219</a>

I have been a Mac user for many years, and typically used Macs for development and a Windows PC for gaming. I recently setup WSL2 on my new Ryzen desktop, and it has been great for web development. Works pretty seamlessly, and not being able to run GUI apps was one of my few complaints (mostly because I wanted to run a graphical git difftool). Glad to see they have addressed this.

Very interesting -- especially the fact that CBL-Mariner (Microsoft&#x27;s internal linux distro) is used to plumb X11&#x2F;Wayland apps across to a Windows-based RDP client. The complexity involved is a little unreal to behold[0].<p>I wonder - is Microsoft truly committed to this path of building Linux support into Windows for the <i>long</i> term? Have they considered building an MS Linux distro with support for Windows apps? Perhaps by embedding the actual Win32 COM server, which would function like the COM server in WINE but be multi-threaded.<p>I&#x27;m not a Windows guy, but I&#x27;d be sorely tempted to switch from MacOS if Microsoft released a fully-supported Linux distro (with or without Win32 support).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;wslg#wslg-architecture-overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;wslg#wslg-architecture-overview</a>

I tried it. Window resizes and moves are very laggy, but I mean, it&#x27;s pretty great other than that.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EBdMKz7.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EBdMKz7.png</a><p>Kind of hard to justify buying anything else for a dev laptop at this point.<p>edit: I feel obligated to mention the code in that screenshot is not something I wrote. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathblog.dk&#x2F;project-euler-141investigating-progressive-numbers-n-which-are-also-square&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathblog.dk&#x2F;project-euler-141investigating-progr...</a>

On my 2nd chromebook computer but likely moving back to mostly to Windows because of WSL2.<p>Just 1 of many benefits: build native Windows GoLang app from WSL2: (Caddy server)<p>env GOOS=windows go build -o caddy.exe<p>No need to setup gcc in native Windows. Not sure if this works on all GoLang apps, but at least works for a reasonably complex Caddy server

Windows still does not support sub virtualization on amd hardware. I.E you cannot use kvm in wsl. Why would you want to? Testing in clean environments. Microsoft also does not allow vmware to use AMD-V if you have WSL or hyperV enabled. I believe that is also an effect of sub virtualization.<p>There&#x27;s currently plenty of bugs wherein if you use vmware without amd-v things like disk encryption don&#x27;t work (fedora 34, ubuntu 20.10 etc).<p>Microsoft continually says &quot;they&#x27;re working on it&quot; but it&#x27;s been a long while and it&#x27;s obvious they have other priorities here. AMD ryzen cpu&#x27;s have been the superior CPU for a while now, methinks there&#x27;s lots of handshakes between intel and microsoft.

The video [0] is great!<p>Main takeaway: you can open apps by clicking on the icons. So you&#x27;ll be able to have shortcuts without opening a terminal. That&#x27;s great! Will render my local X server obsolete.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f8_nvJzuaSU&amp;t=12s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f8_nvJzuaSU&amp;t=12s</a>

Cool, GPU support via a D3D12 backend for Mesa! OpenGL only though. I hope they plan to do a Vulkan Portability implementation on D3D12 as well.<p>&gt; rendered content needs to be copied to system memory before being presented to the compositor, to be brought back onto the GPU in the RDP client running on Windows (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;commandline&#x2F;wslg-architecture&#x2F;#hardware-accelerated-opengl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;commandline&#x2F;wslg-architecture...</a>)<p>Ouch, that&#x27;s pretty bad for performance. I hope they plan to improve this as well.

Microsoft, just go all in: embrace Linux kernel and make a MS GUI on top of it, call it MSLinux or something. It will save time&#x2F;money along the way I believe.

That&#x27;s really cool.<p>When I tried WSL a while back, file system access was pretty slow especially for scanning large folder trees with many files (important for programming projects). Is this still an issue or has it improved in that area?

For now unfortunately you have to turn on &quot;Optional diagnostic data&quot; - aka &quot;full spy mode&quot; - to access this feature.

Half of me: &quot;Cool! Now we only need to release software for linux!&quot;<p>Other half of me: &quot;Hmmm... Now companies will have less incentive to support linux running natively on their hardware...&quot;

So pretty much, this starts an RDP server on the WSL side, with Windows acting as the client. I liked the old solution of running a Win32 X11 server and connecting to it from WSL more.

Who will be the first one to try to run Windows GUI apps in Wine inside WSL ?

I&#x27;m personally very excited for this. Also, the fact that Linux apps will show up in the Start Menu is a nice touch and will be much more enjoyable than starting GUI apps from the terminal.

Anyone with a Mac who can compare file system operations between Mac and WSL2? I jumped ship from Windows to Mac before WSL2 as it was just too slow to use. Unfortunately the Mac isn&#x27;t much better so I&#x27;m curious if it&#x27;s worth moving back with WSL2.

Looks like some kind of group policy now prevents me from running WSL on my work machine. In the past Hyper-V bluescreened the peculiar Win 10 build my company uses, making WSL2 (and Docker Desktop, for that matter) a no-go. WSL1 still worked, but I eventually requisitioned VMware Workstation to run Linux and docker for projects that required them. For anything else I&#x27;ve got tried-and-true MSYS2 installed, which works well enough.

So, as a mostly Windows guy: What Linux GUI apps are you going to run? What has a Linux GUI but no Windows app or alternative?

Now the question is can I run Wine on WSL...

I learned from the video you can launch VS code from within WSL with &quot;code .&quot;<p>That&#x27;s really useful. I like it.

As a user of Interix on Windows NT (porting an entire X windows application including Motif and OpenGL) around 2000, I&#x27;m glad to see they finally managed to improve on it.<p>For real, though, I will give MSFT tons of credit for this. They really did an impressive job all-around.

Does anyone know if native or near-native disk IO performance is coming to WSL? This has been a pretty big challenge from using it if your use case requires any decent iops. It would be magical if WSL could do physical NVMe pass through for example....

As an AT&amp;T Unix&#x2F;Solaris&#x2F;HPUX&#x2F;NetBSD&#x2F;Linux embedded developer for the last 35+ years, I find this quite useful. While I still have two machines (Windows 10 + Ubuntu 18.04) I can see this progress leading to a point where I have one machine doing both. I just need them to get qemu-arm working correctly on X86 to support ARM target development. Hopefully they&#x27;ll get qemu-risc-v working, because I can see RISC-V in my future.

Is this to be expected in the next regular Win10 update (outside of the insiders build)?

&quot;Now available&quot; is a bit misleading. It&#x27;s only available on the latest version of Windows Insiders.

Weren&#x27;t there X11 systems for windows for a long time?

Questions:<p>1. Does the vGPU support mean that we get decent cuda support AND wayland? I know they mentioned a nvidia specific driver<p>2. Given they are supporting x&#x2F;wayland, would it be possible to run i3wm or sway for window management?

I am beginning seriously to consider moving to windows from Mac, even with the M1 chip. In the end, I must have a Linux runtime and WSL support seem to be getting better and better.

I really like WSL. Some weeks ago I switched to Ubuntu again because developing is still a nightmare on Windows. But what really impressed me was how much faster it is.

Oh great, now Microsoft is going to have a polished wayland implementation before us.<p>Dibs on the year of WSL Desktop!!

Year of the Linux desktop!<p>Microsoft has finally embraced the Linux desktop, maybe next they extend it?

Any ideas around what could be leveraged here with docker? I&#x27;m thinking it would be great to have all dev tooling + IDE bundled into containers for quickly switching projects&#x2F; getting devs up to and running fast.

I wonder whether the approach utilized in WSLg could be used as (alternatively to waypipe) a way to provide network transparency in Wayland on Linux. A use could be seamlessly running native Wayland apps on Xorg.

This will make my life probably very difficult. My worry is that this will give the IT departments ammunition to push devs from Linux to Windows to be able to control their devices better. They will be able to say that the work on the Linux software now can be done on Windows so there is no need for exceptions for the developers from company policies.<p>I know, I should really get out of the automotive industry and those big companies anyway because they&#x27;re so abusive, but right now, because of my private life, I&#x27;m kind of stuck at least for a year or even more. Just hoping that I can get out before this becomes reality :D

<i>obviously</i> they just wanted Wine on Windows to work properly, &#x27;cos that&#x27;s an easier way to make Encarta 97 work than adding Win16 support to Windows 10

I&#x27;m super disappointed with wsl&#x27;s move to hyper v. I tried out wsl2 3 months ago, overall system performance took a hit, not just slower WSL experience, but slower windows experience too.<p>In addition, I had to choose, wsl2 and no other vms through vmware or virtualbox,. or WSL with vmware and virtualbox. they claim they work together nicely, but they don&#x27;t. vmware and virtualbox crash, freeze, and crawl to a halt constantly when hyperv is enabled.<p>so back to wsl1 for me. I love WSL, I think it&#x27;s the future, just please don&#x27;t build that future on top of hyperv!!! :&#x27;(

Looking forward to testing my OpenGL lecture code on this, it works under Windows and Linux natively so working on WSL will be a major bonus for me :-)

A Trojan horse? Honestly, is this enough to finally call time on the Linux desktop? I&#x27;m considering trying Windows as my next Linux distro.

This is all very cool Microsoft, but what I really want is Visual Studio and C++ running on Linux with full debugger support like on Windows.

When will Android Apps appear in the Start menu?

Is this saying that WSL 2.0 supports Vulkan now? Because if it just supports opengl, that&#x27;s pretty meh.

I wonder if the motivation for this is really to give Linux machine learning apps access to the GPU in WSL?

But... Can I run virtualbox along side wsl2 without the massive performance hit in virtualbox?

Can’t wait to run “native” Linux GUI on Windows10 (ARM, of course), on my bare M1X iMac!

I don&#x27;t want poo poo too much over this, because I like the fact that MS at least seems to be trying, but is it a common need at all? Who is the target audience here. I am not a developer so it is possible I am missing a use case.<p>I am on popos now and when I need windows, I VM into one. Obviously it works the other way works as well.

So, 2021 is finally [0] going to be the year of the Linux Desktop?<p>&#x2F;s<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3038d4&#x2F;when_was_the_first_year_of_the_linux_desktop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3038d4&#x2F;when_was_the_...</a>

Soon linux will be very much illrelevant on workstations. Very nice

Nice that this is easier, but is this better than just using VcXsrv?

Main website for those lazy to read the article: aka.ms&#x2F;wslg

I can&#x27;t wait to get this running to see Word 97 in Wine.

...or I can use VirtualBox and spin up multiple versions and flavors of Linux and use that. Then delete when I don&#x27;t need them anymore. Not sure what this is trying to solve.

Superb. WSL goes from strength to strength.

It&#x27;s impressive as hell

Is this J++ again?

STEP 1: Embrace STEP 2: Extend &lt;-- you are here STEP 3: Extenguish

The moment you notice that the guy posting it is literally wearing an suit and tie.<p>This is no Linux from the inside collaboration, speaks volumes as to the culture around the project.<p>Since when are developer outreach teams wearing traditional suit and ties?

This should be called the Linux Subsystem for Windows. The real Windows Subsystem for Linux is WINE, which runs Windows programs on Linux. It can not only run GUI programs, it runs games reasonably well.