2019 - The Year of Linux on the Windows Desktophttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/"Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows" says Windows Devblog.
Microsoft desperately needs a Linux strategy. While they arguably won on the desktop - at least, the enterprise desktop - they utterly lost in the data center. And because the Data Center is now being rebranded as The Cloud and there are about 10 large cloud operators on this planet, having a Linux strategy is essential. More so since Kubernetes is dockerizing everything and that kind of cements the Linux API for about all newly developed applications, until all of eternity.
So WSL1 was taking the Windows Kernel and tried to create a Linux System Call Interface for that. That did not work so much, and so a lot of modifications were made to the Windows Kernel, such as Picoprocesses and similar. Still, it did not perform as an original Kernel, some things were unimplemented, other unimplementable, and again others kind of worked, but were performance bugs.
WSL2 is therefore throwing all of this interface out of the Windows, quite literally. Instead of running a container (which is just a Linux process with fairy dust), you are running a VM with a Linux kernel (like MacOS, Windows is adding the term “lightweight” in front of VM in order to make it sound more low-cost) and then creates a non-pod for your image or images to run in it. Now you have a Windows Kernel running nothing but Linux kernels in production, which kind of begs the question what that Windows Kernel is good for in the first place, but yeah.
You get Linux on the Desktop. On each and every Windows Desktop.
That is not quite what people had in mind when they spoke about Linux winning on the Desktop, but in a way that is even more satisfying than the original idea.
Microsoft.
Delivering a Linux kernel.
With.
Every.
Single.
Copy.
Of.
Their.
System.
Hold that thought for a moment.
