wslg VS WSL2-Linux-Kernel

> It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop or laptop, with no configuration required.

I have been using it since the beginning of WSL 1 with a very terminal heavy set up but it has some issues.

For example WSLg's clipboard sharing is buggy compared to VcXsrv. It doesn't handle pasting into Linux apps without introducing Windows CRs. I opened an issue for this https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326 but it hasn't gotten a reply.

Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.

Related issues:

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008

WSLg[1] is Microsoft's first-party solution. It's interesting because it uses RDP as the display layer.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

As far as I know it only supports basic tapping/clicking for GUI applications and not multi-touch or gestures.

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737

WSLg(Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI) uses RDP and FreeRDP to work: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm hopeful the experience is better than last time I tried Hyper-V enhanced linux experience. I imagine this use case is getting FreeRDP way more attention.

For years I've developed in a Linux VM on a Windows host via VirtualBox. The typing lag on this, particularly in IDEs like VSCode and Rider, finally got to me. So, I moved over to WSL and have to say; the experience is amazing.

This is running in WSL?

Microsoft has some wayland stuff already for WSL, though I think internally there's RDP involved: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

That said. Graphical apps will just run on WSL without needing to install anything. Check: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

What are you talking about? Its free forever https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Actually, you can https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.git cd WSL2-Linux-Kernel

By the way, Microsoft publishes the WSL kernel source, under GPL, as they must: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

From here on out it gets a bit hazy. For kernel builds you will have to use the Microsoft Linux Kernel (don't laugh, it's actually a thing). The USBIPD project walks through a WSL kernel build, so you can use that as a guide of sorts. Once you've done everything you need with the disk, the Gentoo project shows how to import it, but if you already have the VHDX file, I think the import-in-place option may be simpler. Take care in CH2 when making the filesystem. I'm not sure if WSL want's only one ext4 partition or if it walks the disk looking for root. There may be some .wslconfig settings for this, my first guess would be kernelCommandLine.

This was true for WSL1, but WSL2 does contain a Linux kernel. The source code for it is available at:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

git clone --branch mytag0.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel use tag for your version

But if you need a custom kernel then build it by taking Microsoft's kernel config as your base and then set the following up accordingly in your %USERPROFILE%\.wslconfig file:

It uses a customized version of the Linux kernel (repo) that integrates with the host Windows OS. You can build any distro on top of that kernel, as people have done with (of course) Arch. The distro isn't any less "real" than a distro that it run on QEMU (and with a level 1 hypervisor, all systems that uses one are technically virtualized already).