> That’s because with this feature we are automatically starting a companion system distro, containing a Wayland, X server, pulse audio server, and everything else needed to make Linux GUI apps communicate with Windows.
You see me impressed. Especially as they are supporting Wayland. Now please make electron apps non-blurry on Wayland
I think you are getting downvoted because you're mixing up terms. Ryzen is a CPU architecture brand (which all the deep learning libraries can use). You're wondering if CUDA-accelerated PyTorch (if there's an NVIDIA card) or a ROCm-modified Linux kernel + PyTorch (if there's an AMD card) would work correctly.
Is that a problem for Microsoft? It's not like folks are going to move away from Windows as a result. The reason they run Windows is because that's what they know and that's what's installed on their machine when they buy it. This for the most part eliminates the reason someone would have to move from Windows to Linux.
Spot on. This is no knit-your-own-yoghurt altruistic move. It's all part of a well-coordinated effort to re-establish Microsoft as _the_ place that everyone does compute. "Commoditize your complement" as Joel Spolsky put it [0]; "windows on every desktop" for the cloud era.
Ballmer went head to head with open source and thought he could crush the threat. That didn't work, and things weren't looking great for MS before he was ousted.
Nadella's strategy is far more subtle: not quite Embrace/Extend/Eliminate, more Embrace/Neutralise/Replace.
Linux is a threat to server-side windows? Fine. Let them deploy on linux, so long as those linux boxes are in Azure. But that means devs get familiar with linux at the expense of windows, which means (a) they'll want linux on their desktop and (b) things are more readily transferable to AWS/GCP/whatever.
So: give them linux _in_ windows. Make appealing tools like vscode available free to create good will and positive sentiment towards Microsoft. Re-build the advocacy that hemorrhaged in the latter days of Ballmer's tenure.
And they're nailing it. By comparison to Google/Facebook/Amazon, there's very little negative press for Microsoft. And lots of positivity, even just in this thread.
It's hard not to be impressed by how successful they're being. And I say that as someone who still bears the scars from the 90s/00s hegemony. Microsoft was positively reviled by swathes of people in those days. Their attitude and market abuses rightly got them into hot water with the DOJ.
So, whilst I respect the turnaround, I'm wary. Microsoft is cruising inexorably back to dominance. History says that wouldn't be a good outcome.
>This for the most part eliminates the reason someone would have to move from Windows to Linux.
This 100% describes me. Not only does WSL remove a reason to dump Windows for Linux but it evens removes the need to dual boot. Linux is becoming a Windows App like a browser or media player.
No, the reason I run Windows is because I actually love using it and developing applications with it, not because I'm not capable of installing another OS.
Judging by the performance/UI catastrophe of Outlook, Teams, Windows Terminal and the rest of Office, Microsoft has already stopped writing apps for Windows. Look at them, eating their own dog food.
One of these things is most certainly not like the other. I'm not saying your experience is wrong, just that the general opinion of Windows Terminal is quite positive and can't really be lumped in with the likes of Teams and Outlook.
I believe Microsoft is expected to replace Outlook with a web app-based version in the next major release. Google Chrome is the new Microsoft development platform, it seems.
I'm not aware of any "performance/UI catastrophe" of any of the apps listed above, any context? Sure, Outlook and Teams have less than ideal UX, but the "rest of Office" is pretty good imo.
Pretty sure WSL is a developer tool, so "normal" would still need native apps, unless they go through the hoops of activating WSL so that they can listen to Spotify.
Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel, we will all ask "What exactly is Windows?" (in the spirit of Theseus' ship) and "Is this outcome really Linux on the desktop/laptop?" (in the sprit of No True Scotsman)
To avoid too much theory lol, my perspective is that MSFT views Windows as the trademarks and the 30+ years of backwards compatibility layers (e.g. Direct3D, WinAPIs, etc), and everything else is already expendable (kernel, drivers, etc). Meanwhile, the (slow?) migration to ARM and Web(Electron + derivatives included) will deprecate the compatibility layers too.
FWIW, I think people will still only develop "for Windows" not develop apps "for all Linux distributions", the same way people develop "for iOS/macOS" not "for all *BSD distributions".
MSFT reduces developers and costs because kernel costs become "a relatively large corporate donation" (tiny compared with the reduced developer salaries) and drivers are created by hardware companies instead. Meanwhile, MSFT increases revenue through Azure, consumer services like gaming, consumer electronics (e.g. VR, Surface, etc), enterprise sales "for the support/compatibility", and increased adoption/street-cred given its now "Linux on the desktop, laptop, AR/VR and tablet". Its simply a no-brainer for MSFT.
This is not a new idea: found one of my responses from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719. There is a parent comment describing Windows as "just another Linux distribution", albeit it'll 1. be the most deployed Linux distribution by a lot and 2. continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).
> Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel
> continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).
The comparison isn't apt. macOS can use BSD licensed programs because it's allowed to create derivative works that are closed source. Anything constituting a derivative work based on the Linux kernel has to be open source because of the GPL's virality.
So unless you think Microsoft will be willing to keep all their custom software restricted to userland (requiring basically everything else to be GPL) it seems extremely unlikely that this will happen. Microsoft is going to want to continue developing an operating system, not merely a Linux distribution.
Obviously I'd love to see it happen, but I find it extraordinarily unlikely for these and other reasons (backwards compatibility? Continuity with previous sysadmin tools?)...
Wouldn't it be easier for MS to just open-source the NT kernel instead of making the big shift to Linux? I can't think Windows' internals (if they ever get exposed) could have been inferior to Linux in any way.
Yeah this is just like when IBM's OS/2 ran Windows applications. Software developers thought "Great. I'll just code it once for Windows and be on OS/2 for free!"
... except that if Microsoft did, likely very few would embrace such extensions.
A successful EEE play requires a lot of pre-existing trust that has to last through the Extend phase, which is why I don't think they'll ever try that again in the foreseeable future.
I'm still convinced the long term plan is to stop people being able to boot a Linux kernel on desktop hardware (think secure boot) and when people complain the response is going to be "but you can run Linux on Windows!"
After all, there must be something diabolical when Microsoft is just doing something to appease devs who have for years railed against them for being dev hostile.
These settings are being respected, as far as I can tell. Since when is it not common sense to assign a reasonable amount to a VM? The only thing that does not seem to work well at the moment is a "memory balloon" RAM allocation scheme. WSL2 is a VM, not a shared memory container. They could do better, but RAM is pretty cheap nowadays and WSLg is IMO the much more productive feature.
Are you sure? I watched the conference and this uses the RDP framework behind the scenes, integrating with Wayland. Why would it consume much more than running natively?
That's been going on for a few months already, I have a single Docker image running in WSL2 running SQL Server and it's using 5 GB of memory while idle.
Maybe unrelated but I think it is a Hyper-v (w10) issue, not a WSL one. At least same thing happened to me some days ago on one VM running on Hyper-v, it went crazy and consume all my 32gb of ram. It seems to be fixed after reducing the number of cores available to it.
Maybe it's just me, but after testing Steam on Linux, which promised a good coverage [1][2], i'm more and more feeling like replacing the only left Windows device with linux. The only thing that would make sense for me, is that microsoft should port their UI to linux and handle their backwards compability with wine.
I mean, what is the benefit of keeping their own kernel, when obviously they understand that another kernel and userspace is more and more important, and even used by them selfs.
Except, not all games on Steam work on Linux. I’m primarily a Mac user, but I have a windows partition on my laptop so that I can play steam games that are Windows only. It would be fantastic if there was no such thing as Windows only games anymore.
I so far stumbled upon only a single game that doesn't work on linux for me, and it's not because the game is not working, but because the anti-cheat tool has problems and the game doesn't let me join multiplayer sessions.
I have been primarily using Linux as my main gaming system, and I can say it's pretty great.
Among the games that did run flawlessly for me are The Witcher 3, Skyrim, GTA 5, numerous indie games (Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Northgard, etc.) and so much more!
I have been a Mac user for many years, and typically used Macs for development and a Windows PC for gaming. I recently setup WSL2 on my new Ryzen desktop, and it has been great for web development. Works pretty seamlessly, and not being able to run GUI apps was one of my few complaints (mostly because I wanted to run a graphical git difftool). Glad to see they have addressed this.
This is EXACTLY my story (right to the Ryzen processor). Always been a Mac developer, got windows PC for gaming, then tried to do all my development on it, with WSL making that that actually enjoyable.
The VS Code team has done a phenomenal job with VSCode remotes - it's like magic. Such an incredible architecture that allows them to do that.
Hej, almost the same for me, but after seeing steam-proton and wine overall more and more capable of running games, i consider switching to linux. Even Microsoft accepts that linux is so important today, that they started to do a hole lot to emulate/integrate it. Why bother with an emulation, when you can get the real deal?
I've always found it to be 99% there. But that 1% prevents you from doing any serious work. Things like mongo become a nightmare when using WSL. Its been entirely frustrating for me.
I would have much rather they focused on getting popular libraries to work rather than focus on the flashy GUI features
Yes. On my Surface Go 2, WSL2 got me 99% of the way there, but having to forward my ADB port (for KaiOS dev) and then other issues (unresponsive X apps on resume) led me to install Arch and then wipe Windows.
More specifically:
i3 helps me make better use of my limited 10.5" screen AND my limited RAM & CPU. Plus, 'composing' my own desktop environment has advantages: with the help of i3's wonderful docs, customizing things to fit me is easy: foreign city's time next to local? Done. A custom brightness command whose intervals I can adjust? Check.
I loved WSL2 until I discovered the speed of my Arch + i3 install.
Very interesting -- especially the fact that CBL-Mariner (Microsoft's internal linux distro) is used to plumb X11/Wayland apps across to a Windows-based RDP client. The complexity involved is a little unreal to behold[0].
I wonder - is Microsoft truly committed to this path of building Linux support into Windows for the long term? Have they considered building an MS Linux distro with support for Windows apps? Perhaps by embedding the actual Win32 COM server, which would function like the COM server in WINE but be multi-threaded.
I'm not a Windows guy, but I'd be sorely tempted to switch from MacOS if Microsoft released a fully-supported Linux distro (with or without Win32 support).
WSL allows some developers targeting Linux to continue using Windows as their main OS. It also makes them more likely to choose Azure over AWS due to integration with the tools. It's a well-planned move that translates into real revenue.
Free fully supported Linux distro with Windows support will only reduce the sales of Windows itself. So no, this isn't happening.
> Free fully supported Linux distro with Windows support will only reduce the sales of Windows itself.
I didn't say free, though that is one option.
I'm thinking if they could build a DisplayPS compositing window manager on top of, say, an MS-supported Ubuntu derivative, make the window manager awesome, market and sell it as Windows NC for Next Century, build in hardware support for everything -- basically go all-in.
Keep the next-gen window manager, core apps, and the Win32/DirectX compatibility layers proprietary, the rest open-source, and license the whole thing. Charge $200 per license or something.
If they did all that, they'd make a killing.
The fact that it's a Linux distro at its core would be a relatively small detail (and a killer feature for developers at the same time). Darwin is also open-source, but MacOS on top is highly proprietary and profit-producing.
> Kind of hard to justify buying anything else for a dev laptop at this point.
It will be interesting to see how the M1/M2/... series of Apple silicon evolves. If they can deliver graphics performance on par with a low-end nvidia GPU I'm pretty much sold on it in the near future. PC has simply no hardware to compete with that, may it run Linux or Windows.
WSL2 crashes consistently n my own microsoft laptop in current windows, and I've tried diagnosing an improper configuration: how does one work around that?
This doesn't seem like a genuine question. You provide no details, and WSL2 works great for everyone I personally know. You could probably get help there: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues
But, obviously, you would have to actually be willing to provide meaningful details and not just... what you posted here.
Which chromebook do you have? I was recently tinkering with my pixelbook on the dev channel, I believe you can launch kvm vms from the chromeos 'linux subsystem' it's kind of like WSL2 in reverse but with KVM vs hyper-v. Wonder how a win10 vm would run, although the lack of workstation grade hardware for chromeos seems like it would hold that back. Launching android apps is pretty slick though
I have to use a secure Windows laptop for work, but I admin Linux servers. WSL has been great for me, if only so that I can use a real linux command line and terminal instead of PuTTY when I SSH into boxes.
Readit News
You see me impressed. Especially as they are supporting Wayland. Now please make electron apps non-blurry on Wayland
I think that's a reasonable question to ask! I think a lot of this landed earlier though: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/06/17/gpu-ac...
Thanks Microsoft!
Ballmer went head to head with open source and thought he could crush the threat. That didn't work, and things weren't looking great for MS before he was ousted.
Nadella's strategy is far more subtle: not quite Embrace/Extend/Eliminate, more Embrace/Neutralise/Replace.
Linux is a threat to server-side windows? Fine. Let them deploy on linux, so long as those linux boxes are in Azure. But that means devs get familiar with linux at the expense of windows, which means (a) they'll want linux on their desktop and (b) things are more readily transferable to AWS/GCP/whatever.
So: give them linux _in_ windows. Make appealing tools like vscode available free to create good will and positive sentiment towards Microsoft. Re-build the advocacy that hemorrhaged in the latter days of Ballmer's tenure.
And they're nailing it. By comparison to Google/Facebook/Amazon, there's very little negative press for Microsoft. And lots of positivity, even just in this thread.
It's hard not to be impressed by how successful they're being. And I say that as someone who still bears the scars from the 90s/00s hegemony. Microsoft was positively reviled by swathes of people in those days. Their attitude and market abuses rightly got them into hot water with the DOJ.
So, whilst I respect the turnaround, I'm wary. Microsoft is cruising inexorably back to dominance. History says that wouldn't be a good outcome.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
This 100% describes me. Not only does WSL remove a reason to dump Windows for Linux but it evens removes the need to dual boot. Linux is becoming a Windows App like a browser or media player.
Deleted Comment
One of these things is most certainly not like the other. I'm not saying your experience is wrong, just that the general opinion of Windows Terminal is quite positive and can't really be lumped in with the likes of Teams and Outlook.
To avoid too much theory lol, my perspective is that MSFT views Windows as the trademarks and the 30+ years of backwards compatibility layers (e.g. Direct3D, WinAPIs, etc), and everything else is already expendable (kernel, drivers, etc). Meanwhile, the (slow?) migration to ARM and Web(Electron + derivatives included) will deprecate the compatibility layers too.
FWIW, I think people will still only develop "for Windows" not develop apps "for all Linux distributions", the same way people develop "for iOS/macOS" not "for all *BSD distributions".
MSFT reduces developers and costs because kernel costs become "a relatively large corporate donation" (tiny compared with the reduced developer salaries) and drivers are created by hardware companies instead. Meanwhile, MSFT increases revenue through Azure, consumer services like gaming, consumer electronics (e.g. VR, Surface, etc), enterprise sales "for the support/compatibility", and increased adoption/street-cred given its now "Linux on the desktop, laptop, AR/VR and tablet". Its simply a no-brainer for MSFT.
This is not a new idea: found one of my responses from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719. There is a parent comment describing Windows as "just another Linux distribution", albeit it'll 1. be the most deployed Linux distribution by a lot and 2. continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).
> continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).
The comparison isn't apt. macOS can use BSD licensed programs because it's allowed to create derivative works that are closed source. Anything constituting a derivative work based on the Linux kernel has to be open source because of the GPL's virality.
So unless you think Microsoft will be willing to keep all their custom software restricted to userland (requiring basically everything else to be GPL) it seems extremely unlikely that this will happen. Microsoft is going to want to continue developing an operating system, not merely a Linux distribution.
Obviously I'd love to see it happen, but I find it extraordinarily unlikely for these and other reasons (backwards compatibility? Continuity with previous sysadmin tools?)...
... except that if Microsoft did, likely very few would embrace such extensions.
A successful EEE play requires a lot of pre-existing trust that has to last through the Extend phase, which is why I don't think they'll ever try that again in the foreseeable future.
With WSL2, apps will now use either 50% or 8GB of your available memory.
Happy coding!
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166
See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#conf....
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#conf...
Deleted Comment
Btw, notebooks have soldiered ram.
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Weird that i didn't knew this. Couple of years ago i wasted some time to get more "free" memory on my server. Lol
I mean, what is the benefit of keeping their own kernel, when obviously they understand that another kernel and userspace is more and more important, and even used by them selfs.
1: Protondb: https://www.protondb.com/ 2: ProtonDB Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333219
Among the games that did run flawlessly for me are The Witcher 3, Skyrim, GTA 5, numerous indie games (Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Northgard, etc.) and so much more!
The VS Code team has done a phenomenal job with VSCode remotes - it's like magic. Such an incredible architecture that allows them to do that.
It is seamless, even the icons that show up in the Windows taskbar are correct.
If this new WSL2 experience works just as well, I might finally switch :)
More specifically: i3 helps me make better use of my limited 10.5" screen AND my limited RAM & CPU. Plus, 'composing' my own desktop environment has advantages: with the help of i3's wonderful docs, customizing things to fit me is easy: foreign city's time next to local? Done. A custom brightness command whose intervals I can adjust? Check.
I loved WSL2 until I discovered the speed of my Arch + i3 install.
I wonder - is Microsoft truly committed to this path of building Linux support into Windows for the long term? Have they considered building an MS Linux distro with support for Windows apps? Perhaps by embedding the actual Win32 COM server, which would function like the COM server in WINE but be multi-threaded.
I'm not a Windows guy, but I'd be sorely tempted to switch from MacOS if Microsoft released a fully-supported Linux distro (with or without Win32 support).
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/wslg#wslg-architecture-overview
Free fully supported Linux distro with Windows support will only reduce the sales of Windows itself. So no, this isn't happening.
I didn't say free, though that is one option.
I'm thinking if they could build a DisplayPS compositing window manager on top of, say, an MS-supported Ubuntu derivative, make the window manager awesome, market and sell it as Windows NC for Next Century, build in hardware support for everything -- basically go all-in.
Keep the next-gen window manager, core apps, and the Win32/DirectX compatibility layers proprietary, the rest open-source, and license the whole thing. Charge $200 per license or something.
If they did all that, they'd make a killing.
The fact that it's a Linux distro at its core would be a relatively small detail (and a killer feature for developers at the same time). Darwin is also open-source, but MacOS on top is highly proprietary and profit-producing.
https://i.imgur.com/EBdMKz7.png
Kind of hard to justify buying anything else for a dev laptop at this point.
edit: I feel obligated to mention the code in that screenshot is not something I wrote. https://www.mathblog.dk/project-euler-141investigating-progr...
It will be interesting to see how the M1/M2/... series of Apple silicon evolves. If they can deliver graphics performance on par with a low-end nvidia GPU I'm pretty much sold on it in the near future. PC has simply no hardware to compete with that, may it run Linux or Windows.
Overall, feels like using X11 forwarding on a LAN.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. We've reached the final stage already.
But, obviously, you would have to actually be willing to provide meaningful details and not just... what you posted here.
Just 1 of many benefits: build native Windows GoLang app from WSL2: (Caddy server)
env GOOS=windows go build -o caddy.exe
No need to setup gcc in native Windows. Not sure if this works on all GoLang apps, but at least works for a reasonably complex Caddy server
Am I missing something? What does this have to do with WSL 2?