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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

WSL+X410 is an amazing combo. I have every linux desktop app I want at my finger tips, with a functional and superior to cygwin/msys shell.

And with WSL's import feature I have trivially replicated this WSL environment to all of my machines.

Yes, it's won me over.

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I still prefer Cygwin. I can't make a WSL program that is also a win32 program and that has a native win32 GUI. With Cygwin, I can. If I want a sandboxed VM, I can get a sandboxed VM using a number of different technologies, of which WSL is merely one.

Can you post a link to a hello-world like example of how you make a win32 program that has a native win32 gui with Cygwin?

You can cross-compile Windows apps under WSL, as well.

>I have every linux desktop app I want at my finger tips

Oh huh, are you running an X server for this? And if so, does GPU acceleration work for Linux apps?

That's what X410 is for; not sure what the status of GPU support is.

Ah, whoops! Sorry, I read that and thought you were talking about a ThinkPad model at first.

How does X410 compare to vcxsrv?

Link: https://x410.dev/

Lack of virtualization and container support within the WSL was a major blocker for me, has this been resolved?

WSL2 offers Docker support. It will be included in the next update of Windows.

Many people are using it now but I don't have time to mess with beta software. I am exercising my patience.

I'm also a bit disappointed it doesn't bridge the host network like WSL1. It's nice there that I can just run something and access it on local host - it even works together with docker-for-windows, the docker CLI client being in WSL.

I believe that recent(ish) builds of Windows, webservers running in WSL can be accessed from Windows via localhost:port, just like with WSL 1. [0] Accessing servers running on the Windows side from WSL is a fair bit harder, but IMO also a lot less likely.

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-ux-changes...

Oh that's great news. Thanks!

Everything is transparent to me, it's like I'm working in Linux when I use vscode and wsl2 together. There is still the issue with dbus, but you can get a script that replaces sysctl to her things running again.

Edit: to be specific, I can access local servers on wsl2 from windows, I don't even use an xserver.

almost same here, only it's WSL1 + vscode.

Have you tried running docker on windows directly? There's a bit of network fiddling, but you can then use the docker client from wsl

I'm still on wsl1.. and just ran into this today.. you can run docker for windows and the docker client on wsl can access it over tcp For docker composer i had to change the root in wsl.Conf

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