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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:01AM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:01AM (#997177)

    This is Redmond we're talking about: dead I'd believe, dead on the money? Like a 1950s nuclear missile.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:10AM (5 children)

    Nah, simple as hell to code exactly the same bugs in when you have the original source.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:52AM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:52AM (#997339)

      Do you do much open source system code modification?

      I've worked with a team of 2 trying to track down discrepancies between the NVIDIA and Intel MESA OpenGL implementations, literally months of work to tweak out 3 little quirks - and we didn't even have to fix the MESA code, just find work-arounds so our code would run the same on both.

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      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 22 2020, @02:03PM (3 children)

        You're missing that MS can do whatever they like with MS source, including copy-pasta-ing 99% of it directly over, writing wrappers to make Linux calls look like MS calls for whatever they can for much of the rest, and only rewriting the bits they absolutely have to.

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        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 22 2020, @02:35PM (#997857)

          We had the MESA source, it's the only way we were able to fix what we did.

          CopyPasta is powerful juju, but it holds little sway in the realms of shifting hardware layers. Writing wrappers around Linux calls is an efficient shortcut, but it puts MS on the defensive, having to update their wrappers when Linux shifts under them, that's not their traditional role, traditionally they control the shifting sands and force everyone else to scramble to keep their heads up. If they move to a "wrap Linux" strategy (like Apple did), they've surrendered and their valuation will suffer accordingly. Apple's value isn't based on OS-X at all, it's their proprietary iOS that drives their cash machine.

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