DEV Community

Cover image for Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows
Vinicius Brasil
Vinicius Brasil

Posted on

Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows

Recently Microsoft has announced WSL 2. If you don't know what WSL is, you can read a blog post I wrote about it here. On WSL 1, the performance is a known issue, but it seems Microsoft has been making up lost ground.

On their official blog post, plenty of changes have been announced, such as: up to 20x performance improvement, full Linux kernel call compatibility (as the Linux kernel will be shipped with Windows), and so on.

WSL 2 will be a much more powerful platform for you to run your Linux apps on, and will empower you to do more with a Linux environment on Windows.

Liquid error: internal

What do you think about it?

Top comments (13)

Collapse
 
david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

This is very good news. Linux gets headway into the business office, Microsoft makes headway into infra operations. Maybe in a decade or so we will see a Linux based Windows OS? Edge's render is getting swapped for Chromium so who knows. :)

Collapse
 
baddate profile image
SMJ

Winux or Lindows;)

Collapse
 
jsrn profile image
James

I'm pretty jazzed about this. I use WSL pretty heavily for work, and while it performs pretty well and doesn't have many issues, I do run into some weird hurdles with stuff like socket support.

It's the year of the Linux desktop!

Collapse
 
xngwng profile image
Xing Wang

We'll see.
Remember, the internal corporate strategy at Microsoft for any threat is:

embrace, extend, & extinguish

Although, that philosophy may have changed, when it didn't quite work for some of the open source products and companies like google and apple. It certainly worked against netscape during the first browser wars.

Collapse
 
flrnd profile image
Florian Rand

It's great. A lot of the performance issues come from the file system related operations. In my opinion wsl is a great tool, and Microsoft is heading in the right direction.

Collapse
 
tonymet profile image
Tony Metzidis

I switched to a Windows dev machine a couple years ago after my team started having issues with the touchbar Macbook pros. Overall have been very happy with it, especially the hardware . And Windows 10 is very innovative with new features 2x/year . But there are still some rough edges with Windows 10 -- WSL is a bit slow (though usable with the right tweaks), and the terminal is terrible.

Then Microsoft dropped both the Kernel announcement and the sexy new terminal. By the end of the year Windows will be a serious dev environment.

MS sees developers as their key market, and they are innovating very quickly with Windows 10 to please developers. It's a huge win for us, especially since Apple has completely neglected devs.

I highly encourage everyone to try Windows 10, no matter how much you've hated it in the past. It's very good and will be the best platform at the end of the year when the Kernel ships.

Collapse
 
vinibrsl profile image
Vinicius Brasil

That's right! As you mentioned, the current Windows Terminal is really bad. I'm using Terminator running on WSL with a Windows X Server (sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/)

Collapse
 
_hs_ profile image
HS • Edited

GNU+Linux OS with Windows graphics drivers and some proprietary tools for other stuff too is nice move. Although I would love KDE or such as main UI, Windows one is also nice now with 10. The only thing I'm missing on Linux are those drivers + some tools I can live without but would love to have them like PotPlayer. But hey let's see how far this goes. Maybe I'll even consider 1 OS on my laptop if this goes good with development stuff.

EDIT: Just got this link in news feed: hexus.net/tech/news/software/13024...

Collapse
 
xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖

Work done to earn my trust: 1%

Collapse
 
saigkill profile image
Sascha Manns

I'm really suprised and happy to hear that. I working and developing on both, and i think this step is the right one for now.

Collapse
 
aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

True.. Apple has been treating developers badly. Just when they had started to finally attract developers to MacOS after the Windows 8 debacle.