Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#61

Post by temac »

cpascal wrote: post #60
gorkish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should be able to run Linux GUI apps via WSL2 on a preview build soon. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

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

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#62

Post by presumably »

gruez wrote: post #56
szszrk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about javascript code on a harmfull website that does requests to localhost? It used to be possible to easily scan what sites are running locally, even if js code was from a public website. [0] [0] https://defuse.ca/in-browser-port-scanning.htm

The main impediment is that http request won't look anything like the x window requests, so the x server would likely reject it.

There are actually several (published and non-published) ways to exploit that type of configuration, here is one example:

https://samy.pl/slipstream/

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#63

Post by indymike »

thecureforzits wrote: post #48
indymike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside there being no truth to this assertion, last I looked even MS is publishing lots of open source software...

All significant open source development today is done by folks who are not "scratching an itch" but cashing a paycheck, and the projects they release are things that would not have made them money anyway. The actual valuable stuff the trillion-dollar companies of today do is still overwhelmingly closed because secrecy is still a better way to engineer products that sell.

First, I really do appreciate what you are trying to say - that proprietary software is where the money is. It also could be that most of the time, there really isn't a reason to share source code. I've built lots of software for companies large and small. Most of that software is for automating some very specific business process, or making some machine configuration work that no one else in the known universe would ever want anyway. The only developers who that code has value to will work at or for that company. It's not that it is secret, it's just a snowflake. In many cases the budget was so small, that the application wasn't tooled to run anywhere else but on that customer's existing infrastructure, so it would take more time to make that code open-source ready. BTW, open source code generally (but not always) is much higher quality than what I see in most proprietary software because it is going to be reviewed by lots of others and there is often an expectation that that code work on multiple platforms.

Also, when you use absolutes, like "All significant open source development is done by folks ... cashing a paycheck" you are guaranteed to be wrong. It is also disingenuous to people who actually are out there scratching an itch... and to all those developers who started by scratching and itch and finding customers or companies to pay them to keep scratching that itch.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#64

Post by ljm »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #36
manojlds wrote: post #4

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

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.

You can already do some of this with wslu (out of the box on the ubuntu image). You can create desktop shortcuts to linux apps (and I think provide an icon, otherwise it'll try to guess), wslview proxies to your default browser on the Windows side, and I think there are a couple of other things.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#65

Post by uponcoffee »

temac wrote: post #61
cpascal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to run Linux GUI apps via WSL2 on a preview build soon. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

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'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#66

Post by ljm »

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.

I really hope that happens at some point, since there's so much messing around just to get a yubikey working in WSL. I eventually gave up on that.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#67

Post by phkahler »

gorkish wrote: post #59
manojlds wrote: 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…

They are working on Wayland support: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#68

Post by ljm »

nickjj wrote: post #53
josteink wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I did something wrong, but for me getting a local X-server running, with X-forwarding from WSL1 was dead easy and something I used on a day to day basis. Getting the same working with WSL2 was a pain in the ass, and I eventually gave up. So if you like X-forwarding... I personally would recommend sticking to WSL1, unless that gives you other issues.

> Getting the same working with WSL2 was a pain in the ass, and I eventually gave up. Overall it works the same as WSL 1, you just need to change DISPLAY=:0 to DISPLAY="$(/sbin/ip route | awk '/default/ { print $3 }'):0" Here's a snippet from my bashrc that handles both WSL 1 and WSL 2: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/385007837ab787a2be2e...

You can also read the IP from etc/resolv conf.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#69

Post by gruez »

presumably wrote: post #62
gruez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main impediment is that http request won't look anything like the x window requests, so the x server would likely reject it.

There are actually several (published and non-published) ways to exploit that type of configuration, here is one example: https://samy.pl/slipstream/

If you're talking about the general concept of using js to spoof another protocol: that exploit involves middleboxes sniffing TCP connections at the packet level, rather than at connection/stream level. It certainly won't work for connections with a TCP server.

If you're talking about using that exploit to allow access to the victim's machine from the internet: that won't work because listening interface for the x11 server is localhost, not the LAN interface.

Re: GWSL: Run graphical Linux apps in WSL

#70

Post by uponcoffee »

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.

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

Post reply on HN