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Comment by traverseda | Hacker News Reader

The WSL looks a lot like the embrace step of an embrace-extend-extinguish doctrine. I'll believe them more when I can write user-facing apps against their posix subsystem instead of requiring people to jump through many many hoops to actually install it.

Right now it just looks like something they were forced into doing because they were losing on the devtools market.

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WSL 2 foregoes the system call translation approach in favor of virtualization, you get a Linux kernel: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/

>instead of requiring people to jump through many many hoops to actually install it

Yeah the hoops of going to the Store, searching for "ubuntu" and clicking Install

Are they not still requiring this?

    Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

I admit I haven't used WSL in a while.

You still need to enable the subsystem, but I don't see why most users need it on by default. It seems like an easy enough feature to prompt the user to enable (or enable for them automatically) if your application calls for it.

Programs and features control panel, then add/remove windows features, or through command line.

The exact same thing they require to enable or disable any optional windows feature like ie 11, windows media player, I is, ...

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