11 ms·

Wine Running on Windows with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

219 points by my123 10y ago

ryanmarsh 10y ago
Why
OJFord 10y ago
Next step: get WSL running in Wine...
- gpvos 10y ago
  WSL has kernel components, but Wine only emulates user level. So that won't work.
- my123 10y ago
  You may be able to get https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux working actually
  - OJFord 10y ago
    But can it run wine?
    - my123 10y ago
      Not yet :)
EvanAnderson 10y ago
I've been thinking about trying to run Samba under WSL for the lulz. Clearly I should pursue that.
robbiewxyz 10y ago
This really is interesting news for me. I actually moved to a full Linux stack a few years ago when I bought a new computer and discovered that my trusty engineering software wouldn't install on Windows 8 or 10 due to some of Microsoft's many backwards-incompatibilities. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that Wine would run it flawlessly! So, as much as this announcement sounds unnecessary at best, if another part of my job needs me back on Windows 10 someday, I may come back to this.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  I just switched completely to Linux just recently and thought I'd have some issues with necessary Windows software. There was definitely some learning curve to getting Adobe Photoshop CC setup using PlayOnLinux/Wine but it seems to work well. I'm very happy even with terrible bluetooth support in comparison to Windows. I couldn't get a Logitech mouse to pair with the Dell XPS Developer edition. Tried all the command line tricks with bluetoothctl and hcitool. I plugged in a really cheap Kinivo USB bluetooth dongle I had laying around from a headset and it worked easily. Go figure.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Strange, I haven't had any issues with my XPS 13 (9333) or my work-issued Lenovo W540, both of which have been paired with my Microsoft Designer Keyboard/Mouse - go into GNOME Settings, pair, done (of course, they don't work during boot, would be nice if someone could figure out how to get bluetooth devices to work in the initrd so I could use them to type in my encryption passphrase - on the other hand it's probably for the best I'm typing it on a physically wired keyboard).
  - ropeladder 10y ago
    I had endless trouble getting my logitech wireless audio receiver to work in Windows 8 & 10. Works way better in Linux Mint (though it still forgets the pairing pretty often; but that's way less annoying than simply being unable to connect).
  - Glyptodon 10y ago
    I've had the occasional weird experience with bluetooth on multiple OSes.
  - Toenex 10y ago
    If you are using Logitech Unifying Receivers I've found Solaar [https://pwr.github.io/Solaar/ https://pwr.github.io/Solaar/] to be very good.
- wcummings 10y ago
  WineOnWindows was a thing before Windows had Linux compatibility, you can build it with wingw. Running old windows apps is a valid use case for wine these days.
muterad_murilax 10y ago
Was Wine not working with the previous builds of WSL? If so, does anyone know what has changed that allows it to run flawlessly now?
- asdfaoeu 10y ago
  I tried it a while back WSL had some weird handling of unix sockets and they didn't appear on the filesystem.
foota 10y ago
I wonder if you might be able to improve wine by running programs side by side in wine and without and observing call differences.
- Pitarou 10y ago
  Nice idea. By the way, are you Scottish? I don't think they use the word "without" in that way anywhere else.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
    American here, I've seen it used that way in the wild. Uncommon, sure.
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    As a Canadian, that looks perfectly normal to me. Not sure if that's a colony thing or not.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    American, and it didn't strike me as odd.
  - foota 10y ago
    I'm from the northwest, could be regional?
    - skrebbel 10y ago
      Northwest Scotland?
      - foota 10y ago
        Apologies for not being more specific, Northwest US. Specifically, Northwestern Washington. Also known as the Pacific Northwest (PNW)
  - manojlds 10y ago
bubblethink 10y ago
Now all we need is 'Windows subsystem for Linux' to run on wine, and we'll rip a hole in space time continuum.
- netheril96 10y ago
  Wine emulates Win32 API, while Windows subsystem for Linux is based on NT API, a level below Win32 API. So, no, that won't work.
  - g00gler 10y ago
    Dang, OP forgot to put /s
    - DannyB2 10y ago
      The only thing sarcastic is the ripping a hole in space time continuum. Otherwise, it would be a tremendously amusing accomplishment if Wine could run the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Pointless, yes. But so is the 2048 game.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Well, why isn't it possible to emulate just ntoskrnl, just like WSL does with the Linux kernel? Granted, it would require people to have a valid Windows license and install media (because you can't redistribute Windows binaries), but I don't see any major problem.
    - yokohummer7 10y ago
      Isn't the license concern pretty major though? IIRC even in the current form Wine at the early age had been quite controversial, due to legal concerns. They consciously prevented those who have knowledge of Windows internals from contributing to it just to make sure it's a clean room implementation.
      - mschuster91 10y ago
nandhp 10y ago
I see from the screenshot that it's running on Windows 10, Cloud Edition. I thought that the rumored Cloud Edition doesn't run any software not from the Windows store? http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-coming-windows-10-cloud-release-may-have-nothing-to-do-with-the-cloud/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-coming-windows-10-cl...
- kevincox 10y ago
  I thought you downloaded the Linux Subsystem from the Windows store?
  - nandhp 10y ago
    True, that's a possible reason, but I don't think the X server normally comes from the store. (Is there even an X server in the Windows Store?)
    - shawnz 10y ago
      No, it looks like this is a traditional desktop Windows X server.
      - my123 10y ago
        It's vcXsrv, a regular X11 server for Windows.
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    I got it from add/remove features, don't know if it changed.
- hrrsn 10y ago
  Looks like there's a few other posts on Cloud on that blog https://woafre.tk/2017/02/07/windows-10-cloud-part-2-a-detour-looking-at-wsl/ https://woafre.tk/2017/02/07/windows-10-cloud-part-2-a-detou...
- my123 10y ago
dingo_bat 10y ago
The worst part about wsl is that it doesn't work on windows 7 :(
- nxc18 10y ago
  WSL fundamentally depends on kernel improvements that are only available to Windows 10. Similar to the countless other improvements like high-entropy aslr, appguard, better shutdown/bootup processes, a much improved print model, support for new classes of devices (usb3, 3d printing, etc), etc - and that's just covering Windows 8. There has been so much work done to improve the kernel over the last 7.5 years. You don't see mac users complaining that iOS integration doesn't work with Snow Leopard; iOS (the name) did not exist when Windows 7 was released. You certainly don't see snow leopard in the wild anymore. Stop. Using. Windows. 7.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    It's the privacy invasion and the gratuitous UI changes that keep people on Windows 7, not all that technobabble stuff.
    - bicubic 10y ago
      I use w10 at work, but I will not be installing it on my personal machines any time soon due to always-on black box spyware. It seems that the entire tech industry is gently pushing the population to accept broad surveillance as a fact of life. You want to chat to your social circle on facebook? Sure, just hand over all your personal and location data. Want WSL? Sure, just sign here to give us the legal right to rummage around your computer without your knowledge whenever we feel like it.
    - gscott 10y ago
      Anytime an operating system is designed to show you ads it has to be bad!
    - nxc18 10y ago
      The funny thing is, the only people who are sticking around with Windows 7 are the people who should know enough to care about the technobabble. You are not getting the performance you could be out of your PC. Your computer isn't as secure as it could be. You don't have the latest features. Some of those UI changes you mention are actually nice, btw. Your PC is not spying on you; it is not scandalous that a web search via Cortana sends what you type to Microsoft. Telemetry is also not scandalous; Microsoft has had telemetry in Windows & in Office for well over a decade (coming up on two). Perhaps I should consider a career in tech journalism; With all the scandal around Windows 10's approach, I can only imagine how people will react to literally everything they ever do in their browser. You never use your web browser, do you?
boona 10y ago
"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Character Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
slim 10y ago
Yo dawg, I heard you like windows..
sametmax 10y ago
So... Winception ?
- djsumdog 10y ago
  It looks like it hasn't been maintained in a while, but at one point you could run Wine on cygwin, and cygwin on wine .. mostly. I can't find the original post I read on it, but it was an attempt to show how mature each project was at their implementations.
Retr0spectrum 10y ago
Can you run cygwin in it?
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Part of me wants to yell "Inception!" :-) WSL has been getting better and better, I wish they would push the updates to mainline. I can't run the dev releases on my "work" laptop. I've heard that they will be in the next big W10 push (the 'creative' version) but we will have to wait and see.
rasz_pl 10y ago
remember https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im-writing-a-16-bit-windows-emulator-2eae946c935d https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im-writing-a-16-bit... ? looks like Wine made this guys project redundant.
jlebrech 10y ago
great if you need to run a vb6 application on modern hardware maybe
elcct 10y ago
Would be awesome if one day one could use GPU and USB with Windows Subsystem for Linux
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Can that work over X11, or is X11 OpenGL not network-transparent?
  - elcct 10y ago
    I was thinking about using things like TensorFlow or tools for Arduino
Sephr 10y ago
Microsoft has the power to stop the distribution of Wine now that APIs are copyrightable (Oracle v. Google). If you rely on Wine commercially Microsoft could some day force you to pay a license fee or make you move to a future paid Wine competitor.
nikolay 10y ago
So meta!

219 points by my123 10y ago

ryanmarsh 10y ago

Why

OJFord 10y ago

Next step: get WSL running in Wine...

gpvos 10y ago
WSL has kernel components, but Wine only emulates user level. So that won't work.
my123 10y ago
You may be able to get https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux working actually
- OJFord 10y ago
  But can it run wine?
  - my123 10y ago
    Not yet :)

EvanAnderson 10y ago

I've been thinking about trying to run Samba under WSL for the lulz. Clearly I should pursue that.

robbiewxyz 10y ago

This really is interesting news for me. I actually moved to a full Linux stack a few years ago when I bought a new computer and discovered that my trusty engineering software wouldn't install on Windows 8 or 10 due to some of Microsoft's many backwards-incompatibilities. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that Wine would run it flawlessly! So, as much as this announcement sounds unnecessary at best, if another part of my job needs me back on Windows 10 someday, I may come back to this.

exclusiv 10y ago
I just switched completely to Linux just recently and thought I'd have some issues with necessary Windows software. There was definitely some learning curve to getting Adobe Photoshop CC setup using PlayOnLinux/Wine but it seems to work well. I'm very happy even with terrible bluetooth support in comparison to Windows. I couldn't get a Logitech mouse to pair with the Dell XPS Developer edition. Tried all the command line tricks with bluetoothctl and hcitool. I plugged in a really cheap Kinivo USB bluetooth dongle I had laying around from a headset and it worked easily. Go figure.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Strange, I haven't had any issues with my XPS 13 (9333) or my work-issued Lenovo W540, both of which have been paired with my Microsoft Designer Keyboard/Mouse - go into GNOME Settings, pair, done (of course, they don't work during boot, would be nice if someone could figure out how to get bluetooth devices to work in the initrd so I could use them to type in my encryption passphrase - on the other hand it's probably for the best I'm typing it on a physically wired keyboard).
- ropeladder 10y ago
  I had endless trouble getting my logitech wireless audio receiver to work in Windows 8 & 10. Works way better in Linux Mint (though it still forgets the pairing pretty often; but that's way less annoying than simply being unable to connect).
- Glyptodon 10y ago
  I've had the occasional weird experience with bluetooth on multiple OSes.
- Toenex 10y ago
  If you are using Logitech Unifying Receivers I've found Solaar [https://pwr.github.io/Solaar/ https://pwr.github.io/Solaar/] to be very good.
wcummings 10y ago
WineOnWindows was a thing before Windows had Linux compatibility, you can build it with wingw. Running old windows apps is a valid use case for wine these days.

muterad_murilax 10y ago

Was Wine not working with the previous builds of WSL? If so, does anyone know what has changed that allows it to run flawlessly now?

asdfaoeu 10y ago
I tried it a while back WSL had some weird handling of unix sockets and they didn't appear on the filesystem.

foota 10y ago

I wonder if you might be able to improve wine by running programs side by side in wine and without and observing call differences.

Pitarou 10y ago
Nice idea. By the way, are you Scottish? I don't think they use the word "without" in that way anywhere else.
- Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
  American here, I've seen it used that way in the wild. Uncommon, sure.
- mmastrac 10y ago
  As a Canadian, that looks perfectly normal to me. Not sure if that's a colony thing or not.
- azinman2 10y ago
  American, and it didn't strike me as odd.
- foota 10y ago
  I'm from the northwest, could be regional?
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    Northwest Scotland?
    - foota 10y ago
      Apologies for not being more specific, Northwest US. Specifically, Northwestern Washington. Also known as the Pacific Northwest (PNW)
- manojlds 10y ago

bubblethink 10y ago

Now all we need is 'Windows subsystem for Linux' to run on wine, and we'll rip a hole in space time continuum.

netheril96 10y ago
Wine emulates Win32 API, while Windows subsystem for Linux is based on NT API, a level below Win32 API. So, no, that won't work.
- g00gler 10y ago
  Dang, OP forgot to put /s
  - DannyB2 10y ago
    The only thing sarcastic is the ripping a hole in space time continuum. Otherwise, it would be a tremendously amusing accomplishment if Wine could run the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Pointless, yes. But so is the 2048 game.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Well, why isn't it possible to emulate just ntoskrnl, just like WSL does with the Linux kernel? Granted, it would require people to have a valid Windows license and install media (because you can't redistribute Windows binaries), but I don't see any major problem.
  - yokohummer7 10y ago
    Isn't the license concern pretty major though? IIRC even in the current form Wine at the early age had been quite controversial, due to legal concerns. They consciously prevented those who have knowledge of Windows internals from contributing to it just to make sure it's a clean room implementation.
    - mschuster91 10y ago

nandhp 10y ago

I see from the screenshot that it's running on Windows 10, Cloud Edition. I thought that the rumored Cloud Edition doesn't run any software not from the Windows store? http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-coming-windows-10-cloud-release-may-have-nothing-to-do-with-the-cloud/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-coming-windows-10-cl...

kevincox 10y ago
I thought you downloaded the Linux Subsystem from the Windows store?
- nandhp 10y ago
  True, that's a possible reason, but I don't think the X server normally comes from the store. (Is there even an X server in the Windows Store?)
  - shawnz 10y ago
    No, it looks like this is a traditional desktop Windows X server.
    - my123 10y ago
      It's vcXsrv, a regular X11 server for Windows.
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  I got it from add/remove features, don't know if it changed.
hrrsn 10y ago
Looks like there's a few other posts on Cloud on that blog https://woafre.tk/2017/02/07/windows-10-cloud-part-2-a-detour-looking-at-wsl/ https://woafre.tk/2017/02/07/windows-10-cloud-part-2-a-detou...
my123 10y ago

dingo_bat 10y ago

The worst part about wsl is that it doesn't work on windows 7 :(

nxc18 10y ago
WSL fundamentally depends on kernel improvements that are only available to Windows 10. Similar to the countless other improvements like high-entropy aslr, appguard, better shutdown/bootup processes, a much improved print model, support for new classes of devices (usb3, 3d printing, etc), etc - and that's just covering Windows 8. There has been so much work done to improve the kernel over the last 7.5 years. You don't see mac users complaining that iOS integration doesn't work with Snow Leopard; iOS (the name) did not exist when Windows 7 was released. You certainly don't see snow leopard in the wild anymore. Stop. Using. Windows. 7.
- ams6110 10y ago
  It's the privacy invasion and the gratuitous UI changes that keep people on Windows 7, not all that technobabble stuff.
  - bicubic 10y ago
    I use w10 at work, but I will not be installing it on my personal machines any time soon due to always-on black box spyware. It seems that the entire tech industry is gently pushing the population to accept broad surveillance as a fact of life. You want to chat to your social circle on facebook? Sure, just hand over all your personal and location data. Want WSL? Sure, just sign here to give us the legal right to rummage around your computer without your knowledge whenever we feel like it.
  - gscott 10y ago
    Anytime an operating system is designed to show you ads it has to be bad!
  - nxc18 10y ago
    The funny thing is, the only people who are sticking around with Windows 7 are the people who should know enough to care about the technobabble. You are not getting the performance you could be out of your PC. Your computer isn't as secure as it could be. You don't have the latest features. Some of those UI changes you mention are actually nice, btw. Your PC is not spying on you; it is not scandalous that a web search via Cortana sends what you type to Microsoft. Telemetry is also not scandalous; Microsoft has had telemetry in Windows & in Office for well over a decade (coming up on two). Perhaps I should consider a career in tech journalism; With all the scandal around Windows 10's approach, I can only imagine how people will react to literally everything they ever do in their browser. You never use your web browser, do you?

boona 10y ago

"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Character Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

slim 10y ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like windows..

sametmax 10y ago

So... Winception ?

djsumdog 10y ago
It looks like it hasn't been maintained in a while, but at one point you could run Wine on cygwin, and cygwin on wine .. mostly. I can't find the original post I read on it, but it was an attempt to show how mature each project was at their implementations.

Retr0spectrum 10y ago

Can you run cygwin in it?

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Part of me wants to yell "Inception!" :-) WSL has been getting better and better, I wish they would push the updates to mainline. I can't run the dev releases on my "work" laptop. I've heard that they will be in the next big W10 push (the 'creative' version) but we will have to wait and see.

rasz_pl 10y ago

remember https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im-writing-a-16-bit-windows-emulator-2eae946c935d https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im-writing-a-16-bit... ? looks like Wine made this guys project redundant.

jlebrech 10y ago

great if you need to run a vb6 application on modern hardware maybe

elcct 10y ago

Would be awesome if one day one could use GPU and USB with Windows Subsystem for Linux

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Can that work over X11, or is X11 OpenGL not network-transparent?
- elcct 10y ago
  I was thinking about using things like TensorFlow or tools for Arduino

Sephr 10y ago

Microsoft has the power to stop the distribution of Wine now that APIs are copyrightable (Oracle v. Google). If you rely on Wine commercially Microsoft could some day force you to pay a license fee or make you move to a future paid Wine competitor.

nikolay 10y ago

So meta!