Hacker News Reader

Comment by curt15 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft previously reimplemented some Android and iOS APIs in Project Islandwood and Astoria. Is this a continuation of that effort in the spirit of WSL1 or does this use the WSL2 method of using a VM?

View on HN

> The biggest obstacle will be the graphical user interface requirement of Android apps, but with the release of WSL 2, Microsoft has begun working on a project called 'WSL-G,' or 'WSL - Graphics Architecture.' This project utilizes a built-in Wayland display server to run Linux GUI apps directly in the Windows 10 user interface.

Seems to be WSL2. Interesting as I had trouble getting graphical applications to work in Ubuntu under WSL2.

WSL2 explicitly didn't support GUI apps, even though you can do it with workarounds.

Officially GUI support is coming "really soon"™ [1].

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

The concept of "explicitely" not supporting graphics did not make much sense with the X architecture and X servers under Windows being available. Of course MS dis not ship one, and of course X is considered deprecated by its own maintainers.

But de facto it is more a lack of support as in "we don't ship or own implementation yet" than "explicitely it does not work". It works already, Wayland just takes more effort and is just way more coupled to all parts of the stacks, as usual (but don't get me wrong, this sometimes has benefits too)

$ export DISPLAY=$WSL_HOST:0

$ export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

$ export PULSE_SERVER=tcp:$WSL_HOST

$ xlogo

Couldn’t get glxgears to rotate though

Install VCXSrv and enjoy accelerated X under Windows.

For some reason glxgears insists it’ll render on VSYNC that never comes

Naturally you had problems, this feature is not yet out. :)

Here are the details about it,

https://xdc2020.x.org/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/...

This is cool. I wonder if the damage based forwarding can be supported in X as well with the X server in the Linux VM.

I would also love to see this for docker/containers, possibly using Spice instead of RDP.

Is Weston GPL? Will Microsoft be contributing these changes under the upstream license?

Also, interesting to see FreeRDP used instead of a Microsoft implementation, since there's already an Android port of it.

These steps worked for me. Would be good to have better support from MS itself for sure (e.g. built-in X server) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-dev-appconsul...

This seems to be for WSL1 though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com