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Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

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Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#13

Post by killjoywashere »

maaaats wrote: post #8

Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?

He's sort of running open source desktops on a Windows 10 kernel. But not really, there's an abstraction layer called WSL in between. There are some interesting effects though: you can touch test.txt in Bash and then open that file in Notepad without setting up any network shares, virtual machines, etc.

In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice and maybe you won't tell your boss to migrate from Azure to GCP or AWS.

There's a lot of stuff (notably a lot of hardware) that still doesn't work as advertised. Graphics cards being a big one. This fellow got graphical desktops running. Sounds like I/O is an issue, but it works.

Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#14

Post by nxc18 »

interfixus wrote: post #11

Run your Tesla on a petrol engine. Whatever is the bleedin' point?

Its just a fun little project. The idea is to make you question what it means to be a Linux desktop. Here we have very convincing (running authentic binaries!) Linux DEs, but there's no Linux.

Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#18

Post by hashhar »

nxc18 wrote: post #3
imafish wrote: post #2

That 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…

Yes. Sockets are available in Insider releases though but I/O still remains a pain.
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