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Comment by kitotik | Hacker News Reader

> The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows.

Is there really any demand for this though? What Linux gui apps exist that windows users want/need? Enough that Microsoft sees an addressable market large enough to get roi?

The inverse seems to have way more practical use cases that could actually drive revenue - games and legacy business applications (as mentioned in the esr prose).

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I got quite excited when I heard about wslG and rushed to install it.

Never used it since. I did have the Linux version of dBeaver installed that way but there is little/no difference just running the native Windows install for that.

The only use I can really think of is doing cross-platform GUI development, but even then MS will say "hey look, native Linux windowing support in WSL" and also "Not yours, no linux version of MAUI for .NET"

Kind of a mixed message.

Avalonia is a thing and looks bloody amazing across platforms, so maybe no MAUI is not that big a deal.

I use it for running the automated browser tests with my frontend stuff at work. The code is in WSL, and running Cypress or whatever with browsers in Windows with code in WSL seemed to not work. But install Chrome/Firefox in WSL, and it works great with WSLg. Chrome on Linux also attaches to the debugger in VSCode, which doesn’t attach to the Windows version of Edge.

Windows now runs Android apps. Isn't Android some kind of a Linux too?

At the risk of being chastised, Android is Linux like chickens are dinosaurs. Technically true, but not very meaningful.

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