WSLg availability outside of Windows Insider build

[m-talha]

Just wondering when the WSL GUI support will be available to the general Windows builds? An estimate of the timeframe would be very helpful.

Thanks

[spronovo]

WSLg will be available alongside the next major release of Windows. Unfortunately we can't share timeframe for that.

[spronovo]

Correct, WSLg will be available as part of Windows 11.

[KrisRadowski]

so it means that WSLg will be Windows 11 exclusive, right?

[salvatore-coppola]

I still don't get wether will be a release of WSLg for windows 10 or not...

[crramirez]

#347 (comment)

[salvatore-coppola]

thanks @crramirez . So sad :(

[Biswa96]

What does prevent WSLg usage in older Microsoft Windows 10 versions? Assume one can make Weston, freerdp and pulseaudio packages for their distribution to skip the system distro unavailability.

[spronovo]

Today, part of WSL is included in Windows... including the part that create and manage the VM. That's also the part that is responsible for preparing things for and instantiating the system distro... also although the system distro itself is independent of Windows, the way it is configured and launch has dependencies on Windows. There are also dependencies on the inbox mstsc client that we use, which is part of Windows, and has been modified a bit for Windows 11 to fully support WSLg.

[Biswa96]

s/mstsc.exe/wfreerdp.exe 🤔

[kepstin]

Given that WSLg works today on systems that don't meet the system requirements for WIndows 11 (e.g. on my Haswell-era ThinkPad T440p in the current Insider dev build - albeit without GPU acceleration), it would be really nice to hear whether there are plans to backport the WSL changes for WSLg to Windows 10 at some point.

[Biswa96]

There is some light #447

[Biswa96]

Some sneak peak with WSLg in my Windows 10 21H1 x64 system.

[Dakkaron]

@Biswa96 that sounds awesome! Looking forward to the result!

[salvatore-coppola]

me too, thank you @Biswa96

[Biswa96]

It only runs some basic programs like xeyes, xclock, xcalc, glxears etc. Most of the programs are unresponsive. You can find the repository in my profile.

[WSLUser]

@Biswa96 , do you think you could switch Mariner with Clear Linux instead to get even more of a performance boost? The bare minimum packages are easily available without needing to install a ton of stuff. In fact Mariner was inspired by Clear Linux.

[Biswa96]

I guess its possible. But I am neither familiar with Mariner nor Clear Linux nor any distribution with RPM packages.

[elebeaup]

It works without modifying the system. You can simply compile freedrp and weston (from microsoft mirror repository) and install msrdc (https://docs.microsoft.com/fr-fr/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/clients/windowsdesktop) and manually launch weston and msrdc. But, it is very slow (compared to vcXsrv) in rdprail-shell mode. I think it is because shared memory is not enabled but I am not sure if it is possible to configure it.

Tested on 20h2 / NixOs wsl with the latest kernel version.

[Biswa96]

It is also possible to use the provided the system.vhd file and not required to compile freerdp and weston (shared above). But it requires modification with a system file. pros and cons.

[elebeaup]

Did you success to enable the shared memory? This appears to be done through the WSL2_SHARED_MEMORY_OB_DIRECTORY parameter.

[Biswa96]

Nope. I have not look in it.