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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

Can you not use the X11 server packaged with WSL as your display driver, and avoid piping this all into the web browser?

Seems very inefficient to have to render everything through the browser

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WSL doesn't have an X Server, it has a Wayland compositor. That said, yes, you can use that. You can even run a different compositor nested so you get one single window with a desktop if you want.

Ah wayland. Many things changed since the time I've been using Linux in my professional work. However does Wayland support connectivity? I.e. can you display Wayland session on another computer via TCP/UDP? If not then Wayland won't work with wsl2 which is basically a VM

Not in the same way that X does. However, Microsoft specifically implemented an RDP backend into Weston, which ships with WSL2. So the Linux Windows you see are actually being sent over RDP transparently.

wow RDP in Linux. The thing we used to fight for. I must see this. I'm really out of date

Waypipe[0] offers a Wayland alternative for sharing windows over the network.

[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> WSL doesn't have an X Server, it has a Wayland compositor

Which has Xwayland support. You can still run X11 apps.

You can run Gnome (or whichever DE you want) in WSL 2 locally like this:

https://akik.kapsi.fi/rocky/

The desktop is accessed locally and not via a network connection and it's running under Xwayland.

WSL 1 did this well, not so sure about WSL 2+

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