For years now, Windows 10’s Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be—and getting graphical apps to work has historically been possible but also a pain in the butt that required some fairly obscure third-party software.
Windows 11 finally fixes both of those problems. The Windows Subsystem for Linux isn’t perfect on Windows 11, but it’s a huge improvement over what came before.
Microsoft is doing a decent job making Windows a good platform for Linux system administrators, but is WSL really comparable to the real thing?
Making it easy to install is one thing, making the GUI part utilitarian is another kettle of fish altogether.
I understand the excitement if you are a dev who uses a very specific set of Linux GUI utilities, and that is even emphasised in the linked article. But for Joe Average perhaps the best feature is the ability to use the default shell utilities and keep the Windows system itself lean and clean. Gone are the days of finding a specific application port like GrepWin or other utils, just install WSL and get to work!
As a long time Linux admin, GUI support doesn’t really affect my workflow. I had a RHEL system on my desk (up to 2020 when I had a desk and cube) for at least 15 years. All I ever really used was terminator, a browser, and a handful of FOSS tools that are mostly ported to Windows and Mac anyway. Virt-viewer is a good point, that’s probably the only one that isn’t easy. I may not even be typical, but I use *very* few applications still, just need an editor, terminal, git, and browser for almost everything.
Once I stopped going into the office, I put WSL1 on my work Windows laptop and it was mostly fine even if the file system was slow. I even got to the point where I was using terminator + VcXsrv to use my same terminal, but it wasn’t fast and a little flakey. Since moved to Mac for work, and it’s not quite as convenient as a real Linux machine, but it’s close enough that I rarely get burned and 99% of the software I need is native in brew. (virt-manager/viewer is the only tough one that I run into).
WSLg is still pretty buggy. I had applications crash without any error messages, or fail to start second time. The plus is you don’t need to setup X server by yourself to run anything graphical. Once the problems will be ironed out it will be pretty usable.
Will Win 11 finally catch up with X11 (latest stable released 2012)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server The latest stable of X11 implementation was 2018 and a new one is being worked on. The protocol and the software of X11 has two different release dates. X11 protocol has not been changed since 2012 but the software has changed a lot. Remember threaded input only comes in 2016 of the X Org Server.
A lot put into the X11 protocol before being implemented in software.
> is WSL really comparable to the real thing?
It depends on what “comparable” means. And it doesn’t need to be comparable to be useful, anyway.
For me (a “regular” user, not a sysadmin), WSL already means that I no more have a dedicated Linux partition. I used to have a dual boot with Mint, but at some point I realised I was booting it only to update it and nothing else, WSL gives me all the linux-y things I want, which is basically CLI tools. I’ve yet to come across a Linux-only GUI software that I’m missing on W10.
Why use Linux on windows while you can use Linux by itself, it’s something I really have difficulties to understand.
Zoyzou,
It doesn’t make sense if you’re a linux user already, but it can make sense if you’re a windows user. Linux is fairly dominant for a lot of systems & back end development, despite this some people including devs still prefer running a windows desktop.
I use WSL only because of corporate policies wondering let me use a real Linux. Otherwise tgere is no point in it.
imho Linux should provide an OS/2 style wrapper for Windows or a WSL 1 equivalent for Windows while continuing to backfill with the Wine project. Virtualisation is okay but can be a bit hit and miss with graphics drivers so not as performant as it could be.
Microsoft obviously read the book on positioning by Jack Trout. WSL is nothing special in itself but what it does is nip in the bud anyone saying “We need a Linux desktop of that” or idle curiousity. You will find people who may have argued a use case for Linux or who may have taken an interrest won’t because management said nor it took too much energy and why bother when it’s baked into Windows. You may also find nudges to development where people run it past WSL first so Linux tools become more conformant with the Windows environment than the native environment. In short this is a slow burn desktop Linux killer.
this is exactly why WSL has been made: a slow burn desktop GNU/Linux killer.