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I recently got a new laptop that came with Win11. I decided to test-drive it before wiping it and installing Linux. Honestly, once you set it up with a local ac

I recently got a new laptop that came with Win11. I decided to test-drive it before wiping it and installing Linux. Honestly, once you set it up with a local account, it's much better than Win10 for one reason: it's easy to run Linux GUI programs alongside native Windows ones. This is possible on Win10 by installing a Windows Xll server and so on, but it's enough of a pain that I use the Cygwin W32 port of Emacs (my IT department no longer supports Linux workstations). With Win11 I can just use the real, Linux Emacs GUI from Ubuntu, which is a major improvement. Yes, I know I can use a "native" Windows version of Emacs, but to be comfortable I need more than just Emacs itself: I also need a Unix-y environment for it to live in. WSL provides exactly that. I am still going to run Linux on the laptop long-term, but it's changed my mind for the next corporate refresh cycle. We usually get a choice of a Dell Windows machine or a Mac. I was leaning toward Mac for this next round, but I may stick with the Dell if I can get it in Win11.

Our_Benefactors 3y ago
WSL exists in windows 10 also. What’s the advantage of 11?
- ElevenLathe 3y ago
  AFAICT there's no easy way to run Linux GUI apps in Win10 -- you need to run an X server in Windows and have the GUI apps connect over the "network". In Win11 it just works.
  - minifigone 3y ago
    This actually changed somewhat recently (I'm not sure exactly when), but I tried it the other night and was able to run k3b gui from wsl2 on win10.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Apparently, WSLg does away with the need for a separate X server, making things easy to use: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg The "Apparently" is there because it's not something I've tried myself (I'm a Linux desktop user), instead it's something several of our users have tried and said works: https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/issues/2142#issuecomment-1328262332 https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/issues/2142#i...
    - ElevenLathe 3y ago
      This is great info. I'll definitely give it a try on the Win10 machine I have for work. I would love to get rid of Cygwin.

Our_Benefactors 3y ago

WSL exists in windows 10 also. What’s the advantage of 11?

ElevenLathe 3y ago
AFAICT there's no easy way to run Linux GUI apps in Win10 -- you need to run an X server in Windows and have the GUI apps connect over the "network". In Win11 it just works.
- minifigone 3y ago
  This actually changed somewhat recently (I'm not sure exactly when), but I tried it the other night and was able to run k3b gui from wsl2 on win10.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Apparently, WSLg does away with the need for a separate X server, making things easy to use: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg The "Apparently" is there because it's not something I've tried myself (I'm a Linux desktop user), instead it's something several of our users have tried and said works: https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/issues/2142#issuecomment-1328262332 https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/issues/2142#i...
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    This is great info. I'll definitely give it a try on the Win10 machine I have for work. I would love to get rid of Cygwin.