WSLg is short for Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI and the purpose of the project is to enable support for running Linux GUI applications (X11 and Wayland) on Windows in a fully integrated desktop experience.
WSLg provides an integrated experience for developers, scientists or enthusiasts that prefer or need to run Windows on their PC but also need the ability to run tools or applications which works best, or exclusively, in a Linux environment. While users can accomplish this today using a multiple system setup, with individual PC dedicated to Windows and Linux, virtual machine hosting either Windows or Linux, or an XServer running on Windows and projected into WSL, WSLg provides a more integrated, user friendly and productive alternative.
WSLg will ship with Windows 11, but despite it being developed and tested on Windows 10, it won’t become available for Windows 10 users, and is currently only accessible to users of Windows beta builds.
Being able to ditch File Explorer for Dolphin would be awesome.
The problem with that is that filesystem performance across subsystems (Windows filesystems from within WSL2 and vice versa) is absolutely horrible in WSL2 and still is in WSLg/Windows 11, at least when working with many small files.
You can already get Dolphin for windows: https://binary-factory.kde.org/
Microsoft returning back to to it’s full evilness again.
Please Explain how WSLg is evil
WSLg being reserved for Windows 11 (to force upgrade I guess). Just like DX12 was for Windows 10 (yet worked on Windows 7).
Forced update to Windows 11 seems kind of evil to me.. (like what Kochise said). That’s a jerk move.
Merci.
Maybe my Google-fu is weak, but I can’t find any articles saying WSLg will only be available on Windows 11.
Anyone got a link?
Forced? It is open source. It is tested on Windows 10. So inconvenient, but evil?
My point is that seems inconvenient to me, not evil. If you can’t use WSLg, you can use free virtualization, and given how bad WSL’s filesystem access is, that may be preferable.
I have been using the WSLg beta on Windows 10 for sometime. The instructions for setting it up were only available for windows 10 even after windows 11 builds were quite advanced. It worked in windows 11 (since it really is just and updated windows 10). The performance is meh, but probably about as good as a Xserver on windows is currently with ease of use (once it is built-in, the current setup for the beta is a bit involved).
I also don’t get the whole “forcing windows 11 update is evil” thing. Why? You can if you want stay on windows 10, for people with unsupported (windows 11) hardware you get support until 2025. Aren’t updates a good thing? I am no great fan of Microsoft ( I prefer macOS currently) but I think the whole huge over reaction to their stance on windows 11 is ridiculous.
@blueatria
You can buy everyone a new computer who have had theirs artificially throw on the scrapheap for bogus reasons before you get to say they are overreacting. Oh, and pay for the enviromental clean-up bill for the e-waste and people’s time burned up shifting to a new system. It’s not you being inconvenienced so as far as I’m concerned you don’t have a say.
I haven’t even got into abuse of market power and what is in effect a bribe to hardware vendors to maintain market dominance.
I don’t get why some men are so naive and ignorant and lack basic criticial thinking or analysis skills, or who are too lazy to read around the subject. I wouldn’t put up with a man in a relationship like that for five minutes.
HollyB,
Does the argument really need to be sexist? Can you imagine if a man said this about a women? I don’t think it would go over so well, haha 🙂
Hollyb,
Except that didn’t happen, literally or figuratively.
@HollyB If you have numbers for how many people are running computers currently running windows that will be more than (say) 8 years old when the 2025 end of life for Windows 10 comes around, please share them. Because right now all we have is a conversation where you pull out racism, fascism, sexism, etc and rational debate ends
You have conflated the *possible* inconvenience of not being able to use WSLg which hasn’t been released yet, isn’t relevant to most users, and can easily be replaced with free virtualization alternatives with free and open alternatives.
So if you have the data to have an informed conversation about this, then let’s go with the data. But if this is just about asserting things forcefully (which is what it seems like to me), then I want no part of it
HollyB,
I don’t know you and you don’t know me, I don’t know what the need to get personal. I offered my opinion which I stand by. If you wish to offer reasoned response to that opinion, fair enough. The reason I rarely offer opinion in internet discussions is responses like yours.
@HollyB
I was looking with great interest at your contributions to this site, and found it was only opinionated rhetoric in the comments section. Maybe try submitting some news or writing an original article? Maybe then you might sound like something more than a bitter armchair critic.
I mean, some of us have been here a long time and have the signal to noise ratio go down on the quality of reporting and comments. You are not helping those statistics. I only wish more people would submit one story… that would make everything a little better I think.
You can literally get the same functionality using several xservers for windows right now.
The hyperbole whenever MS or Apple release a new OS always gets ridiculous. I truly don’t understand the silly emotional attachment people develop with something as random as an commercial Operating System.
https://xkcd.com/386/
It is the old EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) strategy. Now Windows 11 will have Android and Linux apps. You cannot do the opposite due to legally and technically (windows is made to be difficult to emulate) reasons.
So next time in your company you will ask for a linux laptop the IT department will tell you: “why? here we have already bought a windows laptop and you can run your linux desktop on it, no need to reformat”
Something to be aware of.
https://mesamatrix.net/
Microsoft has not invested the money to complete out opengl to dx12. Valve supported zink opengl to vulkan is way more complete.
Also lot of different Linux distributions are working on moving to pipewire for audio as well.
It does make sense why Microsoft might want to cripple the graphical applications of Linux. They could be attempting to avoid the case of developers making applications going bugger it the Linux version is good enough.
Microsoft hate OpenGL/Vulkan at the best of times so being tardy with API support is no surprise nor for the reasons you suspect.
Well, maybe not OpenGL per se, but certainly Vulkan is a lot newer than DirectX. I suspect the investment they made in DirectX (you know, publishing AAA titles using it, and baking it in to the XBox) probably means they would rather people used their API. It’s not like they don’t abandon things that no longer work. We no longer have VB6 and no longer have XNA and Silverlight. I just don’t think you take in to account that a lot of games studios already have DirectX code written and making that existing code work on a new API platform is a big developer investment and QA nightmare.