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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

They used to sell it for much cheaper - way back when I got it, I'm pretty sure it was under $10. If they raised it that much, surely that's a sign of demand?

I have little doubt that it's a polished fork, but what ultimately matters is the value added - in this case, the value is, "it just works". The only thing I had to do manually was to configure DISPLAY=:0 system-wide in my WSL.

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Have you tried Cygwin's X server? I've been using it for many years already with no problems, and it's free (both as in beer and as in freedom).

That's Cygwin, not WSL. I don't think those two are compatible. I think people want the actual Linux you can get with WSL, not a pseudo-Linux like Cygwin.

It doesn't matter what X server you are running. It is a server, you can send data to it, and it will render the windows. In this case you tell WSL to use X server on Windows and it will work. I think I used Xming for this purpose before. You can also render windows on other computers if network is open and access is provided.

There's no way to run a XServer under WSL because WSL doesn't expose the Win32 session at all, unlike Interix.

I'm about 100% sure this thing just wraps the Cygwin X server, seeing its rootless support has exactly the same glitches.

Cygwin consists of ordinary Windows programs, WSL2 is a specialized virtual machine: they are partly redundant (for the purpose of offering well-behaved POSIX tools) but perfectly compatible.

This would be a correct comment in other contexts but you seem to be unaware of the architecture of X. You can run an X server under cygwin and X clients under WSL.

I did not know this. Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining it.

I've used Cygwin X and Xming before WSL even existed.

The beauty of X410 is that you click "Install" in the store (which also means it auto-updates), run it, and that's it - it's configured out of the box to work in desktop integration mode. Top-level windows are projected onto the host desktop, clipboard is shared etc. It also has some convenience stuff, like DPI scaling.

I don't think I'd have paid $50 for that myself, to be honest (although I don't think they are actually selling it at $50... this looks more like one of those "permanently on sale" psychological tricks). But when they just got started and were selling it for cheap? I think it was a bargain then. OTOH for somebody who has never even seen an X server before, I can see how it can be a bargain even now.

I also bought it for I think $5 maybe a year or two ago. I've also purchased a license for Xming (while strictly not necessary, at the time I had some version specific issues), and X410 is a very nice set-and-forget application. I would not say it's worth $50, but I have definitely gotten my $5-10 out of it.

Can you please tell me the exact location of the file to configure the system-wide WSL?

Would it be the equivalent of /etc/profile?

The ~/.bashrc file usually.

Start WSL, say by opening a terminal window in it. Then in an Explorer window navigate to:

  \\wsl$

Or, in the terminal cd to your homedir and then type "explorer.exe ." including the dot. This will get you specifically to your homedir.

Where to set global environment variables (and I mean global for all users here!) depends on the distro. On Debian and most derivatives, you can use /etc/environment for this.

I mean, that's the only thing you have to do with VcXsrv..

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