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?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:16PM (3 children)
I used to run colinux [colinux.org] and I also used to use blackbox [blackbox4windows.com] because "Windows" window management was shit.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:21PM (2 children)
Thanks little AC. Those look very interesting. I've heard of them but must not have learnt much. Did MS simply "adopt" colinux?
Trying to do some research... is blackbox pretty much wine?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:33PM
blackbox for Windows is a port of blackbox [archlinux.org] On Windows, a desktop shell replacement that allowed for workspaces (and from memory) pinning and rolling windows up and down. This was around 15-20 years back when I was forced to W2k. A MSCE colleague was impressed enough to start using it himself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:43AM
Blackbox is (was) a simple window manager for X11. It's been forked a few times with the most famous being fluxbox. I used to use it on OS/2, where Xfree86 ran fine, though full screen so it could take over the graphics system.