XDC 2020 - Day 1 - September 16, 2020

The XDC 2020 video: [VIDEO] If you're interested in the lowlevel WDDM driver <-> VM driver mapping, seek to 1:18:01 -- it also talks about the compute APIs like CUDA and OpenCL. If you're interested in WSLG, seek to 2:13:01 -- this is the GUI part of the story.

(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on WSL2. I’m just a huge fan and I say that as a dedicated/devout Mac user) Two things: First, GUI support is coming [1] and the team is working to support both X11 and Wayland [2]. Second, the Remote Development Extension for VS Code [3] lets you do this seamlessly. It auto-configs to work with WSL or WSL2 and can also connect to a container or remote machine or GitHub Codespaces codespace. It’s awesome and all of your files, your terminal, everything is mapped to WSL2, with all the GUI parts from Windows. It’s one of my favorite things. I’m not trying to convince people that WSL2 is the end-all be-all, even though I’m an unabashed fan, but I just want to correct the record a bit (regarding VS Code) and share that X11/Wayland GUI support is coming [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]

A native method of running GUI applications in WSL2 is coming, I believe it'll be in GA in the Fall 2021 release: [LINK] XDC 2020 talk here: [VIDEO] For Windows Insiders running preview builds, I believe some of the pieces are present but not preconfigured. The XDC 2020 conference talk discusses the advantages of the built-in support, including fewer memory copies and lower latency.

Do they? The last time I checked news about Windows they were making big efforts to make Linux apps run[1]. And considering the state of the art of Linux GPU Drivers, maybe using Windows will be the only feasible way to actually run Linux apps. [1]: [VIDEO]