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Has no one seen this yet? Don't cross the streams!
Earlier today, we wrote that Microsoft was going to add some big new features to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, including native support for Docker containers. It turns out that that ain't the half of it.
Not even half.
All is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Instead of emulating the Linux kernel APIs on the NT kernel, WSL 2 is going to run a full Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine. This kernel will be trimmed down and tailored to this particular use case, with stripped-down hardware support (since it will defer to the host Windows OS for that) and faster booting.
The Linux kernel is GPLed open source; the GPL license requires that any modifications made to the code must be published and made available under the GPL license. Microsoft will duly comply with this, publishing the patches and modifications it makes to the kernel. WSL 2 will also use a similar split as the current WSL does: the kernel component will be shipped with Windows while "personalities" as provided by the various Linux distributions can be installed from the Microsoft Store.
To quote Han Solo, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:55PM
People don't care about "Linux" or even "Android" on a Chromebook.
But they will care if you tell them that "your phone / tablet apps in the Google Play store will work on your Chromebook". Now at this point in time, you would have to qualify that as not all Chromebooks offer Android support.
Later you will be able to tell them that there is a "Linux store" with apps like Gimp, Inkscape, WxMaxima, LibreOffice, etc. Maybe at some point video / audio editors that are better than the similar Android offerings on the Play store. The state of Linux on Chromebooks is still definitely not for end users. You can enable it in Settings and try it out. You get a default Debian tightly security boxed by default. In a LXD container on a VM hosted on Google's crossvm. Google wrote crossvm because other virtualization solutions had many features they didn't need, and crossvm is written in a higher level language than C with a strong focus on security. They must ensure that Android and Linux apps simply cannot compromise the actual Chrome OS kernel. If you read up more on this, you can create additional containers, or even vms. You can install other distros. If you install some google packages, then it will get all of the plumbing for its GUI desktop.org compatible apps to have GUI integration with the Chrome OS desktop. I believe the future of Chrome OS is brighter than most people realize. But that is speculation and optimism on my part.
The Google Play store also has Crossover Wine as an Android app.
Don't put a mindless tool of corporations in the white house; vote ChatGPT for 2024!