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GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

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Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#91

Post by DannyB2 »

zamadatix wrote: post #84
uses wrote: post #82

When will Windows Linux happen? I genuinely don't understand the point of Windows as it exists anymore. * Games are developed on cross platform engines. I can't remember the last game I played that was Windows-exclusive. * Business apps work in the browser or Electron, or are otherwise cross-platform. Things that aren't, could work with emulation * Developers are using unix-like operating systems, and MS has leaned h…

If the question is "is there something technical preventing Microsoft from pivoting to a *nix kernel instead of NT" the answer is "no, and there hasn't been for at least 20 years - if ever".

Microsoft has already pivoted before. First was change from DOS based Windows to NT Kernel based Windows. Then again to Longhorn kernel based Windows.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#92

Post by DannyB2 »

science404 wrote: post #26

Can run wine on windows finally?

A few years ago there was an (amusing) announcement of WINE running on WSL. The link quit working a few years ago. The broken link was:

https://woafre.tk/2017/02/08/wsl-wine-runs-on-it/

This is the (still working) Hacker News story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603451

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#93

Post by jayd16 »

uponcoffee wrote: post #65
temac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how WSL was put in the "command line" team and they are now doing graphics, GPU, and audio (plus probably Android again) :)

There was a story a few weeks back about Microsoft working on a new android subsystem. So truly coming full circle; android OS stability (via project treble), the vm approach instead of compatibility layer approach, and improvements to hardware sharing/passthrough to wsl 2 mean that they can finally realize what they tried to do with Projecy Astoria. They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'…

>They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

They own App Center so maybe its not that far away.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#94

Post by voxic11 »

folkrav wrote: post #57
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #36

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.

It seems many people find USB/IP works as a replacement for real USB passthrough http://usbip.sourceforge.net/

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#95

Post by Ayesh »

rtodea wrote: post #10

I recently migrated to Windows from MacOS and have found the following paid apps really helpful: 1. [Pengwin]( https://www.whitewaterfoundry.com/ ) - a customized Debian distribution with helpful scripts for setting up a dev environment 2. [X410]( https://x410.dev/ ) - a customized X11 Server They made all the setup really easy. I reuse some of the scripts from Penguin in the Ubuntu distribution. One caveat for those…

I sometimes get wsl2 to be not responsive too, but you can force shutdown ask (WSL --shutdown) that solves most problems except networking.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#96

Post by 1996 »

folkrav wrote: post #85
uponcoffee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wsl 2 is really cool, right up until you want/need to do anything with the underlying hardware. No usb passthrough, no hardware acceleration, gpu passthrough is there but it's still early stages as performance is about half of native and vendor tooling is absent, etc It's getting better all the time though - they tease usb passthrough might be doable as it's already supported with remote desktop

Yeah it's actually pretty damn good. Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO). IIRC they are exploring USB passthrough using Hyper-V sockets, but it's still very early to actually talk about having that included[1] Once they figure that out I might just as well be able to switch over and stop dual booting. I hate dual booting more than I hate Windows, so it would be an improvement…

> Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO).

WSL1 performance is better for CPU-bound problems

WSL2 only shines due to the VHDX approach. If WSL1 could use a VHDX or (gasp!) a native partition in a native linux format, it would smoke WSL2.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#97

Post by Icathian »

claudiawerner wrote: post #88
uses wrote: post #82

When will Windows Linux happen? I genuinely don't understand the point of Windows as it exists anymore. * Games are developed on cross platform engines. I can't remember the last game I played that was Windows-exclusive. * Business apps work in the browser or Electron, or are otherwise cross-platform. Things that aren't, could work with emulation * Developers are using unix-like operating systems, and MS has leaned h…

> * Games are developed on cross platform engines. I can't remember the last game I played that was Windows-exclusive. To some, that's not a relevant fact. Consider someone like me who plays only one game that's only for Windows and consoles. It's never been released on Linux and I had a terrible experience playing under Wine. I got a KVM switch to play it on my secondary PC. I think there are a lot of people out the…

This is me as well, for league of legends. It's the one game I and most of my friends play exclusively, and is how I keep in touch with the ones who live far away. I'll have a windows box around until league runs on Linux or dies, and not a day more or less.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#98

Post by lanius »

uses wrote: post #82

When will Windows Linux happen? I genuinely don't understand the point of Windows as it exists anymore. * Games are developed on cross platform engines. I can't remember the last game I played that was Windows-exclusive. * Business apps work in the browser or Electron, or are otherwise cross-platform. Things that aren't, could work with emulation * Developers are using unix-like operating systems, and MS has leaned h…

> Games are developed on cross platform engines. I can't remember the last game I played that was Windows-exclusive.

You may not play them, but a significant number of popular[1] games are Windows-only.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_game...

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#99

Post by robviren »

djsavvy wrote: post #76
robviren wrote: post #38

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?

Not awful, though the lack of USB pass-through makes for a challenge. You need to make sure to rune your QEMU with at least 8G ram or it is pretty bad. Good enough to build with anyways.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#100

Post by folkrav »

1996 wrote: post #96
folkrav wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's actually pretty damn good. Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO). IIRC they are exploring USB passthrough using Hyper-V sockets, but it's still very early to actually talk about having that included[1] Once they figure that out I might just as well be able to switch over and stop dual booting. I hate dual booting more than I hate Windows, so it would be an improvement…

> Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO). WSL1 performance is better for CPU-bound problems WSL2 only shines due to the VHDX approach. If WSL1 could use a VHDX or (gasp!) a native partition in a native linux format, it would smoke WSL2.

WSL1 was more or less the reverse-equivalent of WINE as I understood it, more or less a translation layer for a subset of syscalls, the approach is awfully limited from the get go. Not sure how using a VHDX or partition would solve that. We'd be back to square one, with things like containers being unusable again.
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