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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

We need a Linux subsystem for Windows...

Though Wine is quite good.

While similar in concept, Wine is better than WSL1 in a lot of ways due to supporting sound, graphics, and GPU acceleration.

I've always been suspicious of WSL because it follows a narrative that benefits Microsoft - that Linux is primarily a command-line/server environment, and the graphical and audio applications for Linux are not worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like this. WSL1 was based on an Android environment for Windows Phone called Project Astoria, which did support graphics.

The graphical and audio applications for linux aren't worthwhile, or at least they're not competitive with the top proprietary offerings. It's not really about the theoretical capacity of of linux to support audio and graphics. The low market share of desktop linux makes it not economically worthwhile for top proprietary software companies to port to linux. That's just an unfortunate fact. I don't really want to edit graphics with Gimp when Photoshop exists, and I don't really want to produce music in Ardour when Ableton Live exists.

I think the only real way to fix this is to change the economic incentives by increasing desktop Linux market share, which is a long and uphill battle.

Blender is competitive in the industry and definitely "worthwhile". Not the market-leader, but being used increasingly in professional settings.

WSL1 can do graphics just fine, if you run the X server in your Windows environment (which is the right way to do this, in any case). There's implementations - forks of Xming, I assume - that are set up to work like that with minimum hassle, e.g. https://x410.dev/

Yeah, I was trying to set up Selenium (testing framework) with WSL 2. Its workable but you need to write more code to hack around WSL limitations on graphical apps. Using Selenium is a much better experience on macOS and desktop Linux.

cmd.exe via wine :)

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