Live data from Hacker News

Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

github.com

411–420 of 473 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#411
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the greatest features of WSL1 was the fact that it wasn't a VM. All apps were running natively and managed by the windows kernel. I now have to deal with the fact that every so often the WSL 2 VM will simply consume too much memory, which really stinks. WSL1 felt SO close to being perfect.

You can switch back and forth as required, from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w... : What will happen to WSL 1? Will it be abandoned? We currently have no plans to deprecate WSL 1. You can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side, and can upgrade and downgrade any distro at any time.

Yea, but WSL1 has basically seen no new features or meaningful fixes since WSL2 was introduced.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#412

I wonder what Linux exclusive software they are hoping to support. Everything I use in my Ubuntu daily driver has a Windows build or corollary app. I get how ‘you never have to leave Windows’ is a nice thing for their business, but I don’t see this being a reason I would stop dual-booting. The only reason I run windows in the first place is for a few apps, mostly games. Otherwise I really enjoy the bloat-free, ad-fre…

Well, ROS? I can't tell you how many people want to mess around with the robot operating system but don't want to dive head first into Linux. Hell, my very large robotics company won't even give you a linux machine. You're forced to use Mac or Windows or build it yourself. But in general, I haven't dual-booted my main machine since WSL got good, and I'm a linxu-first kind of person with a penchant for windows gaming.

I bet Microsoft would rather that they used Azure Sphere OS or Azure RTOS for that purpose.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#413
post #100

This 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…

WSL was the rebirth out of Project Astoria failure.

https://mspoweruser.com/windows-subsystem-for-linux-started-...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#414

For me WSL has completely replaced dual booting setups. There are still some quirks with integration such as certificates and more. I really can’t wait for the GPU experience to be fully supported and also be able to use pytorch from within containers. Microsoft is so far doing everything right with WSL IMO.

For me that happened already 10 years ago with VMWare.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most corporate PC users do not have that option. WSL solves that.

This is the most plausible explanation. Since most of the newer dev frameworks use very unix like CLI, windows as a dev operating system was feeling very left out. VSCode made this painfully obvious. Most corporates would just offer you a mac instead. WSLg is pretty cool, but if you have a choice, running ubuntu or debian is better, with emulation for whatever windows legacy stuff you need to support.

What dev frameworks?

The ones I use, work perfectly fine in Visual Studio and Eclipse, and Powershell does the rest.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#416
post #115

I haven't had any problems running all types of GUIs in WSL (1 & 2) through Xming for years now.

I recall running the X11 server that came packaged with Cygwin back in the 90s. Where there is a will, there is a way, for several decades now.

And before Cygwin was relevant, we had X-Win32 and Hummingbird.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#417
post #409
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade 2. Yeah I'll just trade in my RTX 3090 for something that has half the performance and doesn't support tensorflow

1 when was this? On Ubuntu lts or Debian stable? 2 if a vendor makes good hw, but poor drivers for your os - that really is on the vendor, not the os? Still, I agree it's frustrating that nvidia is unwilling to commit to Foss/linux.

2 it shouldn’t, and doesn’t matter to the end user. If it sucks, it sucks.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#418
post #325

Microsoft has so much ego that rather than simply making a Linux distro they insist we run Linux on Windows.

They probably know they can't stop developers from deploying to Linux. They're trying to the Windows desktop relevant.

They don't need to try while fighting 1% GNU/Linux desktop.

The whole point of WSL is to bring into Windows, those devs that buy Apple hardware instead of supporting Linux OEMs, and couldn't care less as long as they have their POSIX like experience.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#420
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's missing from the Linux Desktop experience for you? I currently use all three operating systems on a weekly basis, Ubuntu with i3 (a window tiling manager) is my daily driver. Everytime I switch to windows or Mac os, it always feels like a downgrade for me because I can't replicate the tiling experience. The one thing I love about mac, is the trackpad experience, I wish windows and Linux could get to that level…

1. Update glibc and everything breaks 2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks 3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums 4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something…

Sorry for being a bit of a Nix shill, but NixOS aims to solve 1, 2, 5, and the latter part of 6.
Post reply on HN