New Custom Linux Distro is Systemd-Free, Debian-Based, and Optimized for Windows 10 (mspoweruser.com)

An anonymous reader quotes MSPowerUser: Nearly every Linux distro is already available in the Microsoft Store, allowing developers to use Linux scripting and other tools running on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Now another distro has popped up in the Store, and unlike the others it claims to be specifically optimised for WSL, meaning a smaller and more appropriate package with sane defaults which helps developers get up and running faster.

WLinux is based on Debian, and the developer, Whitewater Foundry, claims their custom distro will also allow faster patching of security and compatibility issues that appear from time to time between upstream distros and WSL... Popular development tools, including git and python3, are pre-installed. Additional packages can be easily installed via the apt package management system... A handful of unnecessary packages, such as systemd, have been removed to improve stability and security.
The distro also offers out of the box support for GUI apps with your choice of X client, according to the original submission.

WLinux is open source under the MIT license, and is available for free on GitHub. It can also be downloaded from Microsoft Store at a 50% discount, with the development company promising the revenue will be invested back into new features.

Comments

Re: What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

When a distribution is configured to use systemd it takes the place of initd as the initializing process. It is not something you can simply uninstall. It runs as the first process in the kernel. You have to rebuild the entire distribution to go back to initd.

Nearly every distro? Not really...

[Tog Klim]

There is an outdated opensuse, and no fedora at all. How about a few distros?

Re:Available for FREE or at 50% discount from MS$?

[Dutch Gun]

WLinux is based on Debian, and the developer, Whitewater Foundry

It's developed by Whitewater Foundry, not Microsoft. And yes, you can sell GPL software if you also distribute the source.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

BTW, I searched for "Linux" on the MS Store, and found five explicitly listed Linux distros (Ubundu, openSuze, Suze Linux Enterprise, Debian, and Kali)... but not WLinux. I had to specifically search for it by name before I found it on the store. I'm not sure why they think anyone would pay $10 for a Linux distro when there are plenty of free and well-known alternatives.

Re:Is this useful?

[thegarbz]

It's not a virtual machine. It's also not cygwin. I recommend some research, you may find it useful.

Re:systemd

[DCFusor]

It mostly messed me up with either custom daemons I wrote that wanted to be autostarted - the initial workarounds required were then broken by further systemd updates, and some other kinda - normal apps...that either didn't update for this, or took awhile to start up, and fell afoul of systemd's "helpful" "we'll keep restarting this till it makes it" behavior (which may be gone, I dunno, I figured out enough of how things work to edit that timeout and write scripts for my stuff).
Mounting network shares in /etc/fstab was broken, and if something failed to mount, then the system hung on shutdown trying to unmount what had never been mounted. The "don't do that, WONT_FIX" response was an insult, frankly. Now, like magic, that works again - obviously it was my fault all along for pointing out that doing nothing about it would have caused some months of downtime.
And of course, I don't know what I'm doing with only a few decades of experience in the field. Insulting people isn't how you make friends, but evidently the people doing this don't care.
TightVNC server, oh boy. Finally solved that one using a variant of XDG autostart, but it took the user home one, not the system one, else endless loop. Conky - just had to give up on that one. I could go on for quite awhile. But it wasted my time, and gave me zero new benefit, and took away my choice, as many crucial apps now not only support it, but depend on it. While insulting me - like many of the pro-systemd comments on this thread. Yeah, that'll work. How about calling us deplorables, that'll win you favor every time. Oh, wait...

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'll put my name on that, systemd brings a lot of important features to modern systems, like being able to start network services after a request for the service is received, without dropping the connection or having to have a userspace middleman process that tries to queue as many of these types of requests as it can. The old way sucked hard, the new way with systemd is exactly what we were asking for... 20 years ago.

No. Just no.

Remember that Google engineer who wrote an epic internal memo about his time at Amazon that accidentally got leaked?
Anyway, read this part:

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.

If your services are waiting to start up, then by definition you are NOT monitoring them (otherwise, they would have already started up, no?)
BAD ENGINEER.

That systemd "feature" you tout is a terrible anti-feature for reliable production deployments.

Others in the thread were hating on binary logs, but having some structure makes it much much faster for security tools to parse the logs, and for humans, you just run a single command to get an all-text version if you want it; exactly as hard as running cat to get the text listing...

Bovine excrement.

Text logs have one killer compelling feature. Ironically, it's exactly the feature that you've mis-attributed to systemd.
The "structure" of a text log is that LINE ENDINGS DELIMIT LOG ENTRIES.

This structure is so universal that humans can open the logs in almost any text tool, and read, search, and even EDIT them!
A binary format requires a special tool just to show you where the records are delimited. Let alone reading, searching, or editing those records.

So this argument "It's faster for security tools!" is just excrement, pure bovine excrement.
Binary logs are both unnecessary and foolish.