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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

> still CLI only?

With openssh in windows, it's been quite easy to run an x server in windows, and use ssh with x forward for gui access.

But rdp feels more native to windows, and both x and Wayland has rdp server backends - so you can do things like: https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-enable-wsl2-ubuntu-gui-...

But apparently ms is working on a Wayland compositor allowing directly running gui apps - I don't think it's quite there yet:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...

https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/938#issuecomment-763...

Somewhat related: https://ltsp.org/ I'm not sure about the state of a non-x rdp server for thin clients though.

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Thanks for the links, some interesting stuff there! I think my end goal is to have a contained development environment whilst not being forced to use specific tools (i.e. VSCode remote debugging, eugh) and not sacrificing compilation times by running in a VM that's too slow.

From the look of it, if I were to set up the WSL2 Ubuntu GUI with RDP, that'd tick all the boxes, right? And as a bonus I'd be able to access files in WSL2 from Windows.

Any idea how WSL2 interacts with VPNs? I've seen some mixed reports around the web but this is also a must-have for me, if I can't use a VPN in my dev environment it's game over.

YMMV but for me personally with Dell Sonicwall it basically does not work (even workarounds that mess with MTU sizes are unstable). In my case the behavior is that general networking speed drops massively as soon as both VPN and WSL2 are active. I had to revert back to virtualbox, which does not have such problems and as a bonus allows me to run proper systemd (another thing missing in wsl)

Interesting, that might be a dealbreaker then. Have you found significant slowdowns in working in a VM vs native, both in terms of compilation and day-to-day work, or has it been negligible/unnoticeable?

P.S. thanks for making an account just for this reply :)

Needed to create one for a long time ;) General cpu-bound tasks seem fine in a vm; i/o is definitely slower but much to my surprise linux’s ext4 filesystem is so much more efficient (?) than ntfs for small files that even inside a vm (vbox or wsl) git actions are noticably quicker than on native Windows! I’d prefer is wsl2 for convenience over vbox if I could but my VPN is indeed the dealbreaker and corp. won’t support any other VPN software

> sacrificing compilation times by running in a VM that's too slow

Fwiw wsl2 runs in a vm now (hyper-v). AFAIK it's in order to increase fs performance "inside" Linux (so faster compiles if compiling in wsl).

It's also possible to use cifs/samba shares - but I don't know what you're compiling? Chrome/Firefox sized c++ projects?

Might be worth it to try with a tmpfs/ramdisk either way?

I have it working with vpn. We have vpn at work and it is forced tunneling mode. It modifies routes on my laptop. Since wsl2 is a vm on a different network the vpn client does not know about this network and doesn’t know how to route traffic. If you follows these instructions it solves the problem https://github.com/sakai135/wsl-vpnkit

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