A patch to enable Windows Subsystem for Android to run on Windows 10
github.com
github.com
I really hate Windows 11. It doesn’t run on several of my computers due to its system requirements and for those that it does run on I find the UX to be such a huge step backwards that I find myself continually fighting with the shell rather than actually getting work done. So, I’ve been steadfastly sticking to Windows 10 on machines where I need Windows.
There’s so many things completely artificially gated to Windows 11. The new Apple Music Preview which is gated to 11 can be easily patched to run on 10 just by editing the manifest. I’ve found many other “Windows 11 only” things to be entirely “paper” limitations. I tried to hack WSA onto 10 a while back but quickly realized it was more than a manifest change and lost interest because it wasn’t important enough to me to pursue further.
I’m glad someone took the time to figure it out and I tip my hat to the folks that took the time to debug and reverse engineer this solution. The relative simplicity of the resulting hack to run WSA on Windows 10 shows that it seems to be more of an unwillingness to backport some new APIs rather than any sort of deep technological changes in the OS.
When 7 came around, same thing: most Vista users happily switched, XP users held out until the bitter end.
Every time the sentiment was similar to the comment I'm replying to. Somehow people must be forgetting that the previous thing they had was already better then the current thing. Maybe helped by the fact that the next thing seems to suck even more.
Wait until support for 10 ends and 12 has full screen unmutable video ads. 11 will only seem half bad.
Then they scrapped it for 8 which was a UX disaster. Win10 was OK, but still quirky as hell with lots of weird 8 carry over. I loathed when I finally upgraded from 7 to 10.
I've been using Win11 Pro for gaming mostly and it's OK but not great once I moved the task bar back to the left. I dunno why anyone felt that was worth mucking with. What I really resent about Win11 is the desire to connect my Microsoft account to everything.
Someday I'm gonna seriously give the Steam/Proton thing a try on Linux. I'm battle scarred from trying to game on Linux in the early 2000's... but I need to give it another chance. I'd much rather stay on my Linux host for both work and fun rather than just work.
Unfortunately my game engine of choice (Unity) has pretty spotty support, but even with it crashing every 3 hours (as opposed to once a day on Mac or once a week on Windows), the performance is still much much better than when running the editor under Windows. You win some, lose some.
But as a user, my setup is nearly flawless, and I didn't have to fiddle with any custom stuff beyond what I was already doing on Windows either, maybe less if you count not having to reset my browser from Edge back to Firefox every major update. (Weren't M$ sued to high hell back in the IE days just for bundling it? This seems 10x pushier)
I dropped DXVK on it under Windows and it worked better but was constantly stuttering.
I moved over to Linux (I dual boot) and Steam+Proton ran the game flawlessly. I had to install the xone driver to get my Xbox S/X controller working (and it's a little janky to get connected after restarting) but the game ran _flawlessly_. I was even able to OC my TV to 90Hz under Linux!
It's wild that I used Linux to play a game that wouldn't run under Windows.
I personally find Gnome 4x fantastic, it still feels incomplete but I like the direction it's going.
My only gripe with Linux is applications can be a little janky. Chrome runs like crap (I know people tell me to use Firefox, I am already so deep in the Google ecosystem I don't want to change) - I run it with wayland and regularly submit bug reports to the Chromium team.
Once Chrome is as nice as it is on Windows, I will likely move to Linux as my primary OS.
Did not have any problems with the Xbox controller, though I believe mine is from a Xbox One. Just plug (or bluetooth, which also works fine, unlike in the past!) in and play.
Can't speak about Chrome, I've been on Firefox since 2014.
What issues did you have? With amd/Nvidia, I've never seen an issue in the last year or so.
Until Chrome 109 the scroll speed was too slow. Chromium devs solved this by statically increasing the scroll speed hardcoded in the source, but it still wasn't something defined by the DE so scrolling just doesn't feel like it does under Firefox.
Chrome doesn't respect system defined dark mode.
Dragging tabs off the window to open in its own window isn't implemented correctly. You can drag the window off the tab-bar but you cannot position it on the desktop. You must first drag the tab off the tab-bar, then drag the newly created window to the desired position.
Broadly chrome doesn't really integrate well with GTK, with inconsistent window decorations - like the profile window having a different top bar than the main window.
Edge does a better job than Chrome as far as experience is concerned, but it has its own issues.
Like if you highlight text, you are unable to click anything else on the page without first hitting ESC to unhighlight the text.
Firefox works flawlessly though. If Chrome worked as well as Firefox I'd be happy (haha I know, "then why not just use Firefox" - that's what I do on Linux, but it does keep me away not having my bookmarks, passwords, etc synced between Windows and Linux. Plus I use Chrome for my work and also use PWAs)
I sometimes forget to even look up Linux compatibility on steam games causeI assume they work, especially with single player games. We are at what feels like 98% compatibility and it's usually at worst looking up a few cmdline switches on protondb
I've been trying to game on Linux for a long time too. Have been dabbling on and off for a long time.
I can honestly say that it is better than ever.
You really need a distro that stays up to date. Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, something like that. Ubuntu is probably a close runner up since they release their HWE updates once in a while.
When I say up to date, it is the kind of up to date where some of the new improvements in Proton/Steam/DXVK need Nvidia drivers/Mesa published this month. Although I'd have loved to use Debian stable everywhere, it was the wrong fit for this purpose, and only caused me pain.
Vista mainly got a bad rap in the beginning cos driver support sucked. Had 7 come out instead of vista then the same driver issues would have existed. However when all the drivers were out 7 came out and used all those same drivers and people were like “omg it’s soooo much better” even tho it was basically the same thing.
Vista lets you turn off ClearType, has the classic start menu, still retains the older quick launch, has the fully-featured classic theme customization, Paint and WordPad didn't get assaulted with a ribbon facelift yet.
Windows 7 isn't unworkable with the addition of some third-party customization apps, but you could do a lot more to smack sense into Vista without reaching for them.
The way I remember it it was less gratuitously flashy, or at least easier to switch back into a win2k-like mode. Doesn't 7 force you to use a GPU-accelerated desktop or something?
Honestly, apart from the horrible mistake they made around UAC prompting, most of the rough edges didn't bother me and once I got used to it and could just follow the paths I'd beaten previously to get it to do what I wanted it to, for me it was "mostly just another slightly different Windows UI atop a kernel+OS layer that for my purposes appeared to Just Work.
I am well aware this was not the experience a lot of people had with Vista.
The alternative is admin-privileged programs do not run. See Linux and sudo for an actual terrible decision in privilege escalation in terms of desktop usage.
What's up with sudo?
Vista upgraded the security expectations, although rather harshly compared to XP, but much more useful than anything Linux had or still has. Being prompted vs. looking up commands in manpages/wikis/blogs are two very different things.
Pretending that blindly typing "sudo" in a terminal prompt anytime a command doesn't work without it doesn't make it any better than UAC.
As far as prompts go - why does Chrome/Chromium prompt me on a clean install for a gpg key ring password upon every run?
Is that not worse Than Vista?
My point is, Linux, even at its most refined, most popular version, lags behind Vista.
I guess you can't run things as root, but I've never noticed before now, guess I've never needed to
11 seems to have stumbled out of the gate and it doesn’t feel to me like any of the even most basic complaints I have will ever be addressed. The taskbar for one still has piss-poor usability and represents a huge (and completely unnecessary) backslide from previous versions of Windows. I also hate that I can’t turn off rounded corners. (Yes it’s a minor thing but it really irks me.)
But if I had to name user facing things that are nicer in 10 than 7, I struggle. I'm left at stuff like.... the win-p project/extend/mirror toggle menu?
Obviously there have been developer facing improvements like modern TLS versions or DirectStorage, but none of them couldn't have been done without the UI or privacy changes
I upgraded my Windows 7 to Windows "final version" 10 the week before they announced Windows 11. >_<
That's... not how I remember it. What I remember is that people hated the first Windows 10 builds so much that Microsoft not only couldn't give it away for free, but they had to use deceptive techniques -- essentially leveraging Windows Update as a malware distribution channel -- to force them to upgrade.
The market share of Windows 10 versus Windows 7 speaks for itself.
As a software developer myself, I consider it a bad sign when other people make money selling software to change the way my software works.
https://www.businessinsider.com/windows-10-adoption-rate-vs-...
Windows 8 was widely (and correctly) perceived as a disaster, so it's not a valid benchmark for market share comparison. Windows 7 was the target Microsoft wanted to hit, and that didn't happen until Q4 2018: https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-7-market-share/
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2021/09/07/windows-11-good-b...
Same for the start menu: I installed start11 yesterday and the old start menu is just sooo much faster.
My CPU is a few years old (i7 8700k), and I thought about upgrading because windows 11 was always so laggy, but this showed me that Microsoft is only releasing poor software as their flagship product.
There are some minimal benefits in scheduling threads on big.LITTLE Intel processors, such as mine, through Intel's Thread Director in Win 11. It's just so annoying to have to hack around an OS when they could easily provide something as basic as moving the taskbar on the left (not the icons, the actual taskbar - using a 32:9 monitor).
While the current task manager is rather slow to launch, it also is more functional than the Win7 version. Disk and GPU monitoring being big ones.
Somewhat related side note: check out Process Explorer for in-depth monitoring of every process' attributes/state. It can replace Task Manager in Windows as well, if you want, via a setting.
I’ve looked a lot at its source code and it relies on an incredible amount of hackery to actually work. A lot of what it does is injects itself into various parts of the OS and shims in its own behavior. It’ll do things like redirect API calls to older DLLs or even modify data structures on the fly. It’s how it can do all kinds of cool stuff that your typical “Windows tweaked” apps that only rely on registry changes can’t do. (Not surprisingly the kind of things it does can look a lot like malware to heuristic analyzers.) It’s an incredible piece of reverse engineering but it shouldn’t even be necessary to get back such basic things like squared corners and old taskbar behaviors.
One would think there was some reasoning behind this, but it all just seems like ”let’s make it different because if it’s the same people complain that there’s nothing new in Windows 11”
Looks like the dev has moved to Windhawk, and that at least has partial support for ungrouping[^2].
[1]: https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-and-a-first-look...
[2]: https://ramensoftware.com/windhawk-mods-for-the-windows-11-t...
This is working as well as it does on Windows 11. Root access with magisk is working as intended and I set up Play services and the subsystem was able to successfully log in. There is hardware accelerated x264 playback, I was able to play 1080p youtube with very few problems. The playback occasionally stutters and the youtube player itself occasionally crashes, but that feels unrelated to the underlying ability to playback video. Graphics happen via "Subsystem OpenGL ES Translator" because this is effectively virtualized. Graphics performance on my rtx 2070 (laptop) are buttery smooth, but interfacing with a touch only UI with software mapping is weird at times.
I have no issues with storage or sideloading. The only part where I had to take steps outside of the standard guide was to reinstall a specific appx and manually register a manifest.xml. It looked like it was working without this step but then wouldn't reopen after opening the very first time. I had to enable developer options in both the android system settings and windows subsystem settings, they are two seperate things and I am not sure if they are supposed to sync. Enabling dev options and usb debugging in just android wasn't enough, there was a seperate setting in "windows subsystem for android settings".
Android system storage is a VHDX, I have been unsuccessful trying to mount it. There's no easy way to transfer files back and forth between android and windows. I am not sure if samba will work since it is the same ip. The only other option seems to be ADB.
This has all of the basically all of the downsides of hypervisors. Bluetooth also isn't working.
edit: Just noticed Anbox and Waydroid are open source projects for Linux. Can't say much about them. I was thinking in terms of other Android emulators on Windows like BlueStacks.
I'm sure I could get it to work on a dedicated system, where I matched whatever point release of the kernel and userspace it was designed to run with, but on a normal debian (I think it was buster) install it "shat the bed" so to speak and didn't even offer the reward of actually running the apps I wanted to.
Anbox/Waydroid are containers, they are native
Unfortunately this was quickly patched, and I suspect this Windows Subsystem for Android hack will be as well.
The whole reason behind WSL was to stop the Exodus of cloud developers to running Linux on their laptops (though most of them at my work still prefer it over WSL)
Given how every monitor in existence is wide , it's super odd you can't drag the taskbar to the side, it's bottom only. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-explains-why-you-ca...
The Win 11 context menu is just irritating, it displays a lot of unnecessary things and the "real" context menu is hidden under "show more options"
You can see much more at https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/ -- and this project fixes them, too.
> For fork developers: Please don't build using GitHub Actions, as GitHub will count your forked GitHub Actions usage against this upstream repository, which may cause this upstream repository gets disabled by GitHub staff like MagiskOnWSA because of numerous forks building GitHub Actions, and counting the forks' Action usage against this upstream repository.
is that even remotely true?
If there's any "disabled by GitHub staff" going on, it's likely due to DMCA nonsense, not due to forks having their GitHub Actions billed against the upstream repo. Related to that, I'm surprised to see the submitted repo distribute icu.dll and winhttp.dll, versus telling interested parties to extract them out of the Win11 ISO. I bet Microsoft won't bother striking the repo over 2 random dlls but why roll the dice?
That's not going to happen. For one, having a more secure OS is actually a good thing, but especially for the even larger amounts of control they'll gain over your computer as they move to Pluton and beyond. Imagine, for instance, having your bank verify your OS and software running before doing business with you. Remote attestation is definitely in the plans, see e.g. https://twitter.com/marypcbuk/status/1478416836647657479
You could keep hoping Microsoft will do what you want with their OS, or you could get out while you can.
Currently, I've had the best experience (programs work and do what they're supposed to) with Android-x86, but it's generally a few versions out of date and running a whole qemu instance is heavyweight.
I thought (maybe incorrectly) it was "super bleeding edge", depending on changing and bloating so many aspects of my existing setup as to make the setup useless to me for existing tasks. For instance, I don't have (and don't want) GNOME installed, or any sort of desktop environment, or wayland -- I'd probably have to relearn how to accomplish the tasks I ordinarily do, and it's not worth the cost.
Still, perhaps I should try making a VM. :)
https://github.com/sakai135/wsl-vpnkit
It's not a proxy, but would give some idea how to shim into the middle.
Uses gvisor-tap-vsock underneath: https://github.com/containers/gvisor-tap-vsock
The only ways your certificate works are:
* Your self signed certificates are marked as trusted in the app manifest (which, since it isn't your app, you have to rebuild an APK to modify the network_security_config)
* There's a leftover "accept everything" in the manifest, and that can only work with debug builds.
* You ran it through apktool/equivalent to insert a permissive network_security_config (which only has this ability since 2022, but other scripts have existed before).
Running it through Frida for that purpose is needlessly overkill.
Please know your shit.
/system/etc/security/cacerts
yeah it can. you just mount it as tmpfs.
Basically means: Windows made a KVM to trick any code into think it's running on X natively.
Works pretty well tbh.
Even making it "Windows subsystem for Android applications", a one word addition, would be clearer.
this isn't valid English. can you clarify what you were trying to say?
I don't use the Windows Store, but good idea!