this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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So besides the brownie points, im curious what having it open sourced will benefit. Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS. You can make some extensions but to do what? You can’t really tie it further in to the host OS unless you know of some undocumented Win32 APIs.
Maybe im just not thinking creatively enough.
MS won’t have to pay their own people to work on it anymore.
They released their code as MIT which is far more permissive than I was expecting. I was expecting some sort of proprietary license.
But they need to keep doing stuff like this. Devcontainers for VS Code is still proprietary and keeps me from running codium.
Watch someone reverse the thing into turbocharged WINE
The entire thing is for running Linux software on Windows, it's the complete opposite of Wine.
The infrastructure can be duplicated and studied tho. Would be cool if a little dreamy
Sure, but not useful for wine or Linux
For WSL1? yep that's effectively impossible.
WSL2 is effectively just a wrapper around the kernel virtualization support and a bundling format, as long as whatever image you run talks to the host properly (like any other virtualised OS would) it'd run.
does that mean we could build a wsl that provides the flatpak environment, so that we could get a one click install flatpak for windows?
Should be possible, as it's a normal VM you can already install flatpak apps in said VM as normal, you'd just need a Windows side bit to invoke the install within WSL when you opened the flatpak bundle, and then something to add a start menu shortcut from the app inside the VM (Which I actually assume already exists, I never actually ran WSL2 when I was on Windows)
WSL2 now supports WSLg which allows you to run X11 (or other graphics packages) natively now.