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Comment by ygra | Hacker News Reader

It's a different approach. WSL is more like CoLinux back in the day, in that Windows and Linux kernels run alongside each other. Even a bit better integrated because processes across both worlds can run each other, and see and talk to each other.

No one is taking away your VM, don't worry.

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WSL doesn't run a Linux kernel – a Windows Subsystem just provides a different API to the underlying Windows kernel, in this case the API Linux applications expect. So arguably, it's even further from a VM than CoLinux.

Do you know if they already have proper X support? Or is it just a matter of compiling X.org and running it yourself?

I haven't followed this, but last I've seen a while ago was that you could run an X-server for Windows and then have Linux applications talk to that (and the normal environment didn't have dbus and things like that)

Indeed. For years now, I've been running MobaXTerm - which is a toolset, including a proprietary X server for Windows. Quite convenient.

(Full disclosure: no relation to product, user only)

Well, CoLinux ran Linux as a kernel-mode driver under Windows. WSL is a Windows kernel subsystem providing the Linux kernel API. That's why I made that comparison. I do know that they're very different things technically.

Ah, nice, thanks for the explanation! I do remember CoLinux.

This should provide way better latency than my VM tho, right?

Theoretically, yes, but WSL is still beta and performance (especially filesystem I/O) is mediocre at best. They'll get there eventually!

Nice, because right now altough I use a linux VM for dev work, I am still bummed by the latency and stuff. For tty based work it is there but any X.org workload is still laggy as fuck, which kinda bothers me a little while coding (I'm using Xubuntu with all the VirtualBox additions on).

> CoLinux

Oh, that brings up some fond memories. During my training, I would use CoLinux to run Debian on my Windows XP desktop. Good times... ;-)

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