This is really great on several levels. First of all, I do think the ability to run Linux GUI applications almost natively on Windows is a good thing. Especially, as this ability ships with Windows without having to manually set up a virtualization. This reduced the bareer of running these applications a lot and hopefully this gives incentive to write more Linux GUI applications with the increased audience.

It is of course fantastic for all, who would like to use Linux but are tied to Windows for various reasons. For some use cases, one still would use a classical virtualization like VMware, but for many others, this is an elegant alternative.

It is also good for a pure Linux world, as to my understanding, this is most of all an enhancement of the RDP support for Wayland, basically solving the problem of lacking network transparency. It was a valid critizism of Wayland, that unlike X it didn't have a concept of network transparency. But with all the work done by Microsoft - and it seems to be completely open source - this problem looks to me as solved. Perhaps even better than with X, as RDP is designed to be forwarded over larger distances, while X forwarding is most useful in local networks.

Thanks, haven't watched the whole thing but I like what I see. I also like that this isn't WSL specific. You can do it from a real linux-machine or VM from another host. It also adds wayland applications and not just X11.

Hope that this is something that will spur some wayland->wayland equivalent (since they base it on weston it might be possible to reuse a lot).

One of several presentations Microsoft had XDC, no less. Yes, the X.Org Conference.

They basically souped up the FreeRDP Weston backend (plus a bunch of glue to make it more magical, and some buffer sharing stuff with VMs)

Google Crostini had the Linux in a VM architecture + Window support long before WSL became WSL V2 in a VM.