On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 02:19:51AM +0000, Peter King via talk wrote:
The real payoff is supposed to come Real Soon Now -- probably April:in WSL 2, the Linux kernel itself will receive system calls, running on a trimmed down version of the Hyper-V hypervisor, hosting files on a virtual ext4 disk. It will be sort of like running VirtualBox, but outside the Box.
Right now there is a layer that translates kernel calls into Windows calls. It works surprisingly well.
Right, I forgot about the terrible filesystem performance in WsL1 that WsL2 is supposed to fix.
I have been running Debian-on-Windows (Win10 Pro) for a few months now. It doesn't run X11. There are complicated workarounds for this, but since I do most of my work at the console, it doesn't bother me. YMMV. Otherwise apt-get works as you'd expect, and so far everything runs very smoothly; WSL 1 uses an older, conservative version of Debian stable, and I haven't been tempted to run testing. (Well, okay, I've been tempted, but so far I haven't given in.) Have WSL take over the whole screen and it's very much like running Debian from the console normally.
I have X410 app for windows 10, so it does run X apps.
It's pretty easy to share files between WSL and Windows: the normal windows drive is automagically mounted at /mnt/c/. Then you just read/write to it.
On the whole the integration is rather good. I haven't tried pushing the limits, mostly because I haven't needed to. Windows 10 Pro seems to be one of the occasional "solid" releases of Windows -- I haven't had it crash on me yet, or even misbehave, and things work more or less as you'd expect. However, I don't really know anything about Windows; this is the first time I've even tried it since Win 3.1, so I'm no expert.
WSL 1 runs fine (in terminal/console mode) on a second monitor. It's easy and seamless to go from the Linux environment to Windows, and vice-versa.
It certainly does work surprisingly well. Early on in the betas it was glitchy, but they fixed it up rather quickly. -- Len Sorensen