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GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

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Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#74
post #59
post #4

Isn't it officially coming anyway from Microsoft - https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263377/microsoft-window...

The author of that article seems to be conflating GPU support somehow with GUI apps. GPU support is indeed coming to WSL2 and is available currently in Insider builds along with a special release of the Nvidia driver and some Linux support packages. This, however has nothing to do with graphical applications or GPU acceleration of such. It’s entirely targeted to machine learning frameworks. I do think Microsoft has s…

Microsoft has shown it at X Developer Days 2020.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#75
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be a game changer if they flesh it out. Imagine Linux apps right alongside your windows apps with their own icons and everything. Windows Terminal + Visual Studio Code + WSL2 is the bee's knees.

Until they allow USB passthrough (which is more or less blocked by the fact that Hyper-V itself doesn't seem to have the feature), a whole bunch of my use cases are basically barred from WSL2. Shame, cause otherwise I really, really enjoyed using it - coming from a guy who's been on Linux for 99% of his time for ~15 years at this point.

uh oh. I intend to use only external HDs on my new box (the SSD HD is small) and if I can't mount a USB it ain't gonna work.

I can do it fine in WSL1.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#76

Just ran into this yesterday. What a great solution! I now have WSL2 running graphical linux apps and got a nested VM running with Mojave so I can run osx with macOS-Simple-KVM. I can finally cross compile in a way no one should.

How is the performance in such a nested VM setup?

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#77
post #75
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they allow USB passthrough (which is more or less blocked by the fact that Hyper-V itself doesn't seem to have the feature), a whole bunch of my use cases are basically barred from WSL2. Shame, cause otherwise I really, really enjoyed using it - coming from a guy who's been on Linux for 99% of his time for ~15 years at this point.

uh oh. I intend to use only external HDs on my new box (the SSD HD is small) and if I can't mount a USB it ain't gonna work. I can do it fine in WSL1.

You can mount partitions/drives but something like a yubikey, mic, etc you can't right now

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#78
I had no problem running XFCE desktops under WSL and WSL2 using XRDP and standard Windows's remote desktop client. Still feature set, GUI and overall experience under VMWare feels way better to me. Also ability to test with systemd is a plus.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#79
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh oh. I intend to use only external HDs on my new box (the SSD HD is small) and if I can't mount a USB it ain't gonna work. I can do it fine in WSL1.

You can mount partitions/drives but something like a yubikey, mic, etc you can't right now

Ah, ok. I was trying to follow a support thread and it wasn't clear about that. It made it sound like WSL2 didn't support USB at all.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#80
post #5

what about audio ? next task would be to support some kind of synaptic that would update windows's menu with linux apps...

I've been running apps via xpra instead of X forwarding, and audio works fine there. For silly reasons I'm doing it in Docker, but there's no reason to do that part if you don't need the ephemeral containers.

https://github.com/mook/wsl2-xpra-generic

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