LINUX WINDOWS

Old rivalries have been forgotten and ancient boundaries blurred. Jonni Bidwell investigates this new Redmond-Penguin harmony.

- Jonni Bidwell

Back in 2015 Microsoft decided that it loved Linux. It loved it so much that it built a whole Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which enabled Linux programs and development stacks to run natively. The official statement even involved a heart emoji, which we would have reproduced here but putting in-line images in the body text apparently causes alarm bells and wisps of smoke at the printers.

Anyway, heart or no, some people were sceptical of Microsoft’s intentions, with memories of the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” mantra and the 1995 Halloween papers still fresh in their minds. But it does really seem like Microsoft wants to accommodate Linux users (well, developers mostly), rather than force a mass defection.

A successor, WSL 2.0, was announced in 2019, which was built around a real Linux Kernel, rather than a Wine-like (or whatever is the inverse of Wine-like) translation layer. So WSL 2.0 brought faster performance, swifter filesystems and increased application compatibility. Back in April this year, an exciting new feature was announced. WSLg, enables graphical tools to run seamlessly on WSL. No need to shoehorn an X server on Windows, no need to redirect PulseAudio – heck, it even works with Wayland. So not only can you run Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (WSL’s working title), you can also run Blender, GIMP and Krita. We’ll see how easy it is to set this up on Windows, how it’s a great way to learn Linux, and how to do some weird and wonderful stuff with it.