WSLg – Unifying GUI Apps

Imagine a desktop experience that allows application from any operating system to co-exist side by side. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) has been working on achieving this for Windows and Linux. I was aware of the ongoing effort, but up until now it was only possible to run command line programs within the terminal. My weekend meandering led me to WSLg (WSLgraphics) which claims to run Linux GUI applications (X & Wayland).

The idea that Linux GUI apps such as Xterm, gedit, xv and Gimp could run seamlessly side by side in a Windows environment had me beyond excited. It also took me down memory lane??. As an engineering student I was exposed to Unix via SunOS and later as a sysadmin managed a cluster of Unix machines running Ultrix (DEC’s variant of Unix) which were mounting their file systems from an AIX server.

X server was all the rage then and I would spend hours playing around with different window managers (Motif, twm) wasting time configuring the look and feel.

To my pleasant surprise, it turned out that installing WSL was relatively easy. There are a few pre-req’s and once I took care of them it was short and quick. Details can be found at Run Linux GUI apps with WSL.?Installing packages was simple and straight forward and within minutes I had my favorite X applications running. The windows the task bar does a great job of identifying these Linux applications.

Given the ease with which I was able to get WSL up and running and that it did not require me to start an X server, I was curious to know how this feature works. It turns out that with WSLg, a companion system distro (Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner distro) containing everything that is needed gets automatically started. The architecture diagram below does a great job of showing how it all comes together. If you want to go deeper on the technical details, you can read this excellent blog post written by the team that developed it.

What can you do with this? – This feature provides end users and developers a single environment to use, build, and test both Windows and Linux applications. In the end, how you want to take advantage of this feature is up to you.

Enjoy !!!?