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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the year-of-linux-on-the-desktop dept.

Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10:

Linux on Windows 10 gets a big boost and GPU acceleration

Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.

This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.

While it has been possible to run Linux GUI apps within Windows previously using a third-party X server, poor graphics performance has always been an issue. Microsoft is promising to solve this, too. Windows 10 will soon get added support for GPU hardware acceleration with Linux tools. This is primarily focused on development scenarios involving parallels computation or training machine learning and artificial intelligence models.

So is it the year of Linux on the Desktop?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:41AM (1 child)

    by petecox (3228) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:41AM (#996787)

    Or Microsoft are planning to modernise Windows by progressively shrinking the codebase through FOSS technologies.

    So today's announcement of DirectX on Linux but only within WSL looks bad from the E-E-E perspective but hear me out.

    The optimist in me sees MS dump their own graphics internals to take advantage of Vulkan and OpenCL via Mesa and Gallium3D. DirectX, like OpenGL is then just a shim over Vulkan and the Windows desktop is now just a Wayland compositor atop an NT kernel. Kernel shim aside, vendors then need to write only one implementation of their driver to target Windows, Chrome OS, Android and various *nixes including *native* Linux.

    MS shrinks their code base and gets to focus on their core 21st C business - the cloud, where whether Office 365 runs on Android, ChromeOS or even Windows 10 is immaterial.

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  • (Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:16AM

    by petecox (3228) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:16AM (#996795)
    I binged it and here is MS' plans for OpenGL/CL on Windows utilizing Mesa/Gallium [collabora.com]