GUI app support is now available for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com
Miscellaneous Windows Installer Electron Scoop

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  • Electron

    :electron: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

    • It's by their own admission, this is "very experimental" in Electron 12 and hence not enabled by default.

    https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022#issuecomment...

  • wslg

    Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios

    • 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? This would be possible, perhaps by embedding the Win32 COM server, which would function like WINE but be multi-threaded.

    [0] https://github.com/microsoft/wslg#wslg-architecture-overview

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  • WSL

    Issues found on WSL

    • 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.

  • azurelinux

    Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

  • winapps

    Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

  • Scoop

    A command-line installer for Windows.

    • I thought there was a mingw build, but apparently not. :/

    You see that slow file access with cygwin?

    Last time I had such a use case for windows, I used unision - but isn't rsync, of course.

    https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

    Judging by this scoop.sh issue, there are no obvious not-cygwin builds/ports:

    https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/issues/2295

    Looks like there are libraries for rust and go - but not clients that are a drop in replacement (yet).

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