I have to work with Win11 for work and just noticed the lil Tux man in Microsofts Explorer. Likely to connect to WSL.

Apparently now Microsoft wants people to keep using Windows in a really interesting way. By simply integrating it within their own OS!

This way, people don’t have to make the super hard and complicated switch to linux, but they get to be lazy, use the preinstalled container and say “See, I use Linux too!”.

While this is generally a good thing for people wanting to do things with the OS, it is also a clear sign that they want to make it feel “unneccessary” to switch to Linux, because you already have it!

WSL alone was already a smart move, but this goes one step further. This is a clever push on their side, increasing the barrier to switch even more, since now there is less of a reason to. They are making it too comfortable too stay within Microsofts walls.

On a different note: Should the general GNU/Linux community do the same? Should we integrate easier access to running Winblows apps on GNU/Linux?
Currently I still find it too much of a hastle to correctly run Winblows applications, almost always relying on Lutris, Steams proton or Bottles to do the work for me.

I think it would be a game changer to have a double click of an EXE file result in immediate automatic wine configuration for easy and direct use of the software, even if it takes a big to setup.

I might just be some fedora using pleb, but I think having quick and easy access to wine would make many people feel much more comfortable with the switch.

Having a similar system to how Winblows does it, with one container for all your .exe programs would likely be a good start (instead of creating a new C drive and whatever for every program, which seems to be what Lutris and Bottles does).

EDIT: Uploaded correct image

  • Epzillon@lemmy.ml
    15·
    1 month ago

    Personally WSL has always been riddled with issues for me. I mainly used it for dev things before I switched to linux entirely. Recently I came back to Windows to try some of AMDs new graphics driver features and decided to try out WSL 2. Hell, Windows fucks up so much basic shit in there, i couldnt even run ‘git init’ because some permission issue with drive mounting. Had to move my entire project to a separate drive just to make it work. The way Windows handles the filsystem, permissions and “cross-OS” functionality is so weird and always results in some issue, making the Linux experience feel significantly more wonky than it needs to be. Performance is also a pain, since i had to love my project to a disk that was not part of WSL reading and writing files in VS Code becomes significantly slower.

    I have a pretty high end rig and even my PC runs slow when using WSL, its great to have an option for linux in windows but when a docker container or even just a VirtualBox machine performs better than WSL i have no fucking clue why youd use it.

    Thanks for listening to my rant. Take it with a grain of salt ig, maybe im just incompetent and doing something very wrong.