I found notes somwhere that only you wont’ get graphical GPU apps on 10, just CUDA style stuff.

Don’t forget that way back in the Windows Phone days there was a version which could run Android 4x apps. Although I have a few phones I don’t have the one that is the easiest to run this, but initial reports were that it worked surprisingly well until google broke stuff. It’s back to the WinOS/2 days where there was always a new 3.x version to break OS/2. It’s funny how things come full circle.

Just like me running steam on Linux on Windows, sure it’s overall “pointless” but for things like SheepShaver that demand to have that 0x00000000 base pointer to mimc the PowerPC memory layout, Linux can still do it (running as root……) but Windows has long since trapped this as a NULL pointer protection which you really cannot opt out of. Like address randomization you don’t want this as a ‘best practice’ but sometimes for the sake of optimizations it sure made sense.

So for some system style emulation having this is pretty desirable! Like QEMU, it’s so much easier to build & use on Linux.

I assume it will be, since most PCs will still be running Windows 10 for at least the next couple of years, if not longer.

https://twitter.com/craigaloewen/status/1384921120541978627

WSL itself is incredibly handy but the irony is that all the GUI apps listed on the WSLg GitHub page (gedit, gimp, vlc…) already have native Windows versions, so I’m kind of left wondering what the point is.

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

I can’t imagine people running the Linux version of VLC under Windows being huge on most users’ wishlists, and it will never outperform Linux running natively on the same PC. In any case Microsoft’s fight with Linux is in server space, not on the desktop, and is one they’ve already surrendered.

All that aside, WSLg is an impressive technical achievement.

I’m curious what Microsoft’s future plans are for it.

This is completely speculation but maybe behind the scenes WSLg is more about Microsoft wanting to run Android apps on the Windows desktop – a feature that was announced as part of Windows 11, but not delivered upon release. Though it’s kind of a moot point since I honestly can’t see a huge user demand for regular users wanting to run Android apps under Windows either.

Both things (WSLg and Android apps on Windows) are niche features only available on a niche OS (Win11) that Microsoft themselves evidently don’t want many people to run (due to CPU, TPM, etc requirements).

It’s all very odd but is keeping this Ubuntu user amused.