Technology
Linux GUI applications for Windows 10 are supported by Microsoft.
With support of the GUI framework and GPU hardware acceleration Microsoft aims to significantly boost the Linux (WSL) Windows Subsystem. The tech giant adds a fully-fledged Linux kernel to Windows 10, and version 2, which will run alongside standard Windows applications, later this month.
It is available without X11 forwarding for Windows users and is designed primarily for developers to run integrated Linux development (IDE) environment alongside standard Windows apps.
While it was possible to use a third-party X server for Linux GUI applications in Windows before, poor graphics performance has always been a matter of concern. This is promising for Microsoft to overcome, too. The additional GPU hardware acceleration support for Linux devices will soon be offered for Windows 10. This focuses mainly on developing scenarios involving computers or machine learning parallels as well as artificial intelligence models.
The hardware acceleration for Windows 10 Insiders will begin appearing in the next few months and Microsoft expects to share more detail about the timing of support for Linux GUI apps later in this year.
All these latest Linux improvements clearly target developers who are interested in using Windows as a dev box. In the past years, after surprise everybody by adding a Bash shell to Windows on Build four years ago, Microsoft made some solid improvements to Windows with WSL. In several resources, the technology community has also included WSL.
In Windows 10, Microsoft added OpenSSH, and in the Windows Store even Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora. Microsoft's command line tool Windows Terminal launched last year and this week it has reached an overall version of 1.0. Even Linux file integration in Windows 10 File Explorer is improved by Microsoft.
WSL 2 will potentially fix a variety of unresolved WSL issues and other latest GPU promises. With the original version of WSL, Microsoft has struggled with usability and I / O performance, and this is a major focus area on WSL 2 arriving on Windows 10 later this month.
