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Comment by alichapman | Hacker News Reader

* You can't run your distro of choice unless you build it yourself

* Lots of programs don't work properly (citation needed, can't remember specifics)

* You can only run command line programs, although I understand this could be different in Windows 11

My last job mandated windows laptops so I used WSL for a couple of months before I got too frustrated and just ran a virtualbox VM.

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>You can only run command line programs, although I understand this could be different in Windows 11

WSLg solves this, apparently

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

In the article it says clearly that you can run the distro of your choice using WSL.

Can it run Linux From Scratch (LFS)? It seems like it could.

Yes sure it can, create a usable (chrootable) Linux From Scratch rootfs tarball and import it using wsl --import, and everything should be fine. Though don't forget to remove the kernels because WSL don't load them, instead WSL uses a custom kernel shipped with the Windows system.

And building a custom one is easy. I have Gentoo running in WSL with no fuss.

The distro of your choice from the small pool that you are given to choose from.

It's not a completely unrestricted choice.

That pool includes Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora and a few others if I remember correctly, although it may have expanded since.

I'm not sure how straightforward rolling your own is.

You have no idea what you are talking about. You can install any kind of distribution by copying over their rootfs. For example, I am running Void Linux on WSL2.

The pool in question is open - anybody (not just Microsoft) can package and publish a distro there.

And for one-off use, there's wsl --import: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/use-custom-dist...

Can't you run an xorg server under Windows and let the WSL apps connect to that?

Yeah, you can, but it's pretty janky.

Not if you use an X server that's specifically designed for it: https://x410.dev/

I'll have to check that out, thanks!

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