Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#2That looks awesome. How well do Linux DE's run on Windows?
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#3That looks awesome. How well do Linux DE's run on Windows?
Its a bit of a mixed bag. Just getting them set up tends to be pretty iffy; they tend to rely on lots of sockets, which I gather aren't actually implemented by WSL.
In terms of performance once they are up and running, things are actually pretty decent. The biggest bottleneck appears to be I/O, which is kind of a problem for everything WSL. That part makes installing a gig+ desktop package frustrating as it takes way longer than it should.
The funny thing is the types of issues I get with WSL are also had by people using actual Linux. And there's no compositing.
Final answer: Full Linux DEs run as well on Windows today as they ran on Linux in 2007.
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#4This is really awesome!
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#5Nice. For a long time when I ran windows I also ran Xwin-32 from Starnet[1]. That let me putty -X[2] into a linux box and run things with GUIs on the PC where I was sitting. I found I still had xwin-32 installed so I opened up WSL, set my display to :0 and started up xeyes, and blam! there the were. Very nice.
[2] Not literal, putty has a setting to allow X just like ssh does.
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#6This looks cool! I initially thought by the title you'd made a new grub, but was pleasantly surprised!
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#7Looks pretty sweet, nice work!
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#8Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#9This seems totally pointless, but also quite cool :)
Xming/VcXsrv seem to be working pretty well for me and I get to keep my windows desktop.
Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
#10Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?
It uses the new Windows 10 Linux subsystem (WSL) to run your window manager of choice on a Windows port of the Xserver (pray for the soul of whoever ported that).
Then it neatly integrates that into the standard Windows login.