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Microsoft Releases New Tool To Get More Distros on Windows (zdnet.com)
Microsoft has released a tool to help Linux distribution maintainers bring their distros to the Windows Store to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux. From a report: Microsoft describes the tool as a "reference implementation for a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution installer application," which is aimed at both distribution maintainers and developers who want to create custom Linux distributions for running on WSL. "We know that many Linux distros rely entirely on open-source software, so we would like to bring WSL closer to the OSS community," said Tara Raj of Microsoft's WSL team. "We hope open-sourcing this project will help increase community engagement and bring more of your favorite distros to the Microsoft Store." WSL helps programmers build a full Linux development environment for testing production code on a Windows machine.
Cygwin is slow to create or fork processes, while WSL is much faster there. So things like autotools, config scripts, or make run a lot faster under WSL than Cygwin.
Also, there is more software and library availability for the Linux distros than on Cygwin.
I know a lot of people have ideological objections to WSL, but from a practical standpoint WSL isn't even very good. I tried it for about two weeks before abandoning it.
First, windows has a terrible terminal emulator. I don't think it's improved since Windows 95. Basic stuff like copy/paste is not intuitive, let alone nice features like tabs. I tried an alternative (cmder I think) and it was OK, but something as important as the terminal emulator should not be an afterthought.
Raw sockets didn't seem to work correctly (or at all). I tried a few network tools and they generally fell flat on their face.
It seems really slow. Maybe it's just my imagination, but sometimes I'd do something as simple as an 'ls' and patiently wait.
There was no GUI support out of the box. I had to setup Xming on the windows side. Again, not super complicated, but it seems like little thought was put into it. I don't need a GUI very often (usually just to display plots I generated), but there should have been more effort.
The goal was to basically have python, R, a C compiler, some networking tools, etc, available when I am in Windows and not have to boot a Linux box for basic things. The quality was just too low and went back to using a combination of VMWare and native windows versions.
Maybe it will get better, but it seems like it's trying to solve a problem most people don't have.