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

Is this useful?

[duke_cheetah2003]

Running Linux in a Virtual machine under Windows is nothing new. In my opinion, if you're going to run two operating systems together in this fashion, this is the preferred direction to do it, because Linux traditionally runs waaaay better as a guest than Windows does.

But in the real world, at least my experience, there's not a lot of usefulness to this. It's not like there's anything Linux can do, that Windows cannot do natively. And for the somewhat rare circumstances that a Linux-like utility is needed, like, grep, or perl, or something like that, I've always found cygwin is the best solution for this sort of niche of Linux tools within Windows.

So is this actually more useful than cygwin?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft isn't the ones setting the price here.. it's the distro packager.. err 'customizer'. microsoft gets their cut of the store sales, however.

the custom code for the 'distro' is mit licensed, meaning they can charge whatever the fuck they want and they don't even have to give you their code. they could package everything in binaries and tell you to fuck off if you ever asked for more.

gpl is adhered to, mostly (and with the help of debian repositories since this other distro isn't supplying debian sources themselves), because the distro is only really an installer of debian for wsl with their own (and let's be real here.. MINOR) customizations.

i see this as some guy's attempt to make a cash grab from the few moronic hypocrites who are militantly against systemd yet run (the even-worse) windows 10.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Aighearach]

One of the big things Linux zealots like to yell about is how you only install what you want. How about just don't install systemd? And if you did, just delete it? Seriously, I don't understand.

Right, you don't understand. The people who come to hate on systemd don't have the technical skills to choose for themselves, because it is OS functionality. And the distros, who employ people who understand that stuff, want the advantages of systemd because they do understand what it is and what it does.

Re:systemd

[Aighearach]

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.

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...