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Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
111–120 of 473 posts
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#112What Linux desktop apps do people want to run on Windows? I'm struggling to think of anything I would use that isn't ported alteady, being GTK or QT or Java based.
The use case I care about, and I imagine the use case Microsoft do as well, is developing for Linux on windows, so running an ide and not having to worry about a complicated cross compiling toolchain backing it.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#113This can never be the best GNU/Linux experience because you leave up your freedom and privacy at the door of the Windows login. Anyone who is serious about the future of openess, freedom and privacy rights in software and general should strive for the original. I advocate not to hand over MS the control over the Linux desktop.
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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same situation here. Dual-booting Linux and Windows 10, and I figured I'd boot into Windows often enough for it to get obnoxious. But I only ever get on there to play a few demanding games (which I already don't play often anymore), or make music with an A+ DAW for making music that doesn't run super effectively on Wine. Linux handles everything else I do like a champ.
A friend of mine has been complaining that a DAW is the only thing keeping him stuck in Windows at this point as well. In his case, he specifically said that VST's were the problem. Was your experience the same?
Bitwig is a very good DAW with native Linux support. It's made by former Ableton devs so it definitely leans in that direction, but it works pretty well for other types of workflows too, especially with the recently released version 4.
VSTs are definitely an issue; most high quality commercial plugins are still only released for mac/windows. However there are a few projects for running them in wine and it generally works pretty well.
I do think we'll see more and more Linux in studios going forward, but it would help if Linux got its pro audio story together. Pipewire is a big step in the right direction but not yet mature.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#115I haven't had any problems running all types of GUIs in WSL (1 & 2) through Xming for years now.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#116This can never be the best GNU/Linux experience because you leave up your freedom and privacy at the door of the Windows login. Anyone who is serious about the future of openess, freedom and privacy rights in software and general should strive for the original. I advocate not to hand over MS the control over the Linux desktop.
I completely agree with the sentiment of what you're saying. That said, that's not at all what this is. They are just making it easier to run GUI apps in WSL. This is already something you can do with VcXSrv or any windows-based X server. I've actually been using VcXSrv to run a full Ubuntu Buddgie desktop with GPU acceleration and native performance on my work machine for over a year now. If anything, this has made it easier to _get away from_ the telemetry and crap that goes along with a default windows install because windows has absolutely no idea what I'm doing within my WSL installation.
So yeah, nothing to see here, if anything this is good as it makes linux more accessible to people stuck in windows-only environments. This isn't even M$ making a desktop environment. They have just written an X server into windows instead of having to install one yourself.
side note: I'd also be quite happy if Windows slowly removed the windows parts and replaced them with unixy parts until the whole windows ecosystem could be considered unix-based. That would be so great for so many reasons.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#117This is undoubtedly cool but I'm curious to know of a use case that would warrant installing this. Could this just have been a step in creating "Windows Subsystem for Android" [0] that they decided to release as its own layer? The screenshot on the github page shows VSCode, Edge, Blender, Xcalc, Xclock and GNOME file manager which are all either available natively on windows or redundant. [0] https://www.xda-develope…
Accessing the Windows filesystem from WSL and vice versa is extremely slow, so running for example your IDE in WSL and having your code etc. stored in WSL is useful. I think that is one of the big usecases. It's already kinda supported in vscode, where it runs a vscode server in WSL and Windows just runs the frontend.
It's useful for me when developing dotnet intended for Linux as I can store the code in WSL and be able to build, debug, run docker and so on directly from vscode.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don't get me started on windows settings or audio I'll bite - what's wrong with the audio? Friends on mine in game dev often complain Linux audio is hopeless to work with.
My main complaint on windows is more on the UI than the technical audio. I've got like 15 audio devices listed under the audio menu and windows can never figure out which one I intend to be playing from (and gives them terrible names) so I have to constantly be manually switching it around until I find the right one. My experience on Mac and Linux is that they seem to be able to switch to the right device as it conne…
Makes sense actually. That's been an annoyance of mine as well. I suppose I never realized it's better on other platforms.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#119What Linux desktop apps do people want to run on Windows? I'm struggling to think of anything I would use that isn't ported alteady, being GTK or QT or Java based.
I imagine if your app needs to interact with your Linux system, running it within WSL is a lot nicer.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI
#120WSL seriously changed the amount of work I can do from my gaming PC, but I’m not sure if that’s actually a good thing based on my productivity over the past few months. That aside it’s terrific to see MS putting something good into Windows rather than just removing things and taking choice away from the end user.
> That aside it’s terrific to see MS putting something good into Windows rather than just removing things and taking choice away from the end user.
That's the tip of the iceberg MS want everyone to see, and point the finger at.
MS want people to stop using Linux as an alternative since they lost the battle when they attempted to kill it during the Ballmer era. The plan now is more subtle: making sure everyone using Linux will want to do that from a Windows machine, with all the implications about security and privacy, which would be non existent since any malware (or Windows itself) that for example used Windows keyboard drivers to sniff passwords while one connects say to the bank under WSL "because it's more secure" would be 100% undetectable from that Linux.
The next step will be libraries to access Windows internals and GUI from WSL, so that one can build hybrids that run only on Windows+WSL; very convenient, but unfortunately now Linux is displaced and the only way to benefit from all that software will be to run it under Windows. In the end, MS will create their own Linux distro which runs on top of Windows and will essentially kill all other non-server oriented Linux distros.
Most see WSL as a good thing; I see an elaborate, and have to admit, very clever, way to take complete control of Linux in the next years.