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Red Hat Software Windows Microsoft Linux

Red Hat is Becoming an Official Microsoft 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' Distro (microsoft.com) 48

Posted by EditorDavid from the when-world's-collide dept.
"You can use any Linux distribution inside of the Windows Subsystem for Linux" Microsoft recently reminded Windows users, "even if it is not available in the Microsoft Store, by importing it with a tar file."

But being an official distro "makes it easier for Windows Subsystem for Linux users to install and discover it with actions like wsl --list --online and wsl --install," Microsoft pointed out this week. And "We're excited to announce that Red Hat will soon be delivering a Red Hat Enterprise Linux WSL distro image in the coming months..."

Thank you to the Red Hat team as their feedback has been invaluable as we built out this new architecture, and we're looking forwards to the release...! Ron Pacheco, senior director, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ecosystem, Red Hat says:

"Developers have their preferred platforms for developing applications for multiple operating systems, and WSL is an important platform for many of them. Red Hat is committed to driving greater choice and flexibility for developers, which is why we're working closely with the Microsoft team to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the largest commercially available open source Linux distribution, to all WSL users."
Read Pacheco's own blog post here.

But in addition Microsoft is also releasing "a new way to make WSL distros," they announced this week, "with a new architecture that backs how WSL distros are packaged and installed." Up until now, you could make a WSL distro by either creating an appx package and distributing it via the Microsoft Store, or by importing a .tar file with wsl -import. We wanted to improve this by making it possible to create a WSL distro without needing to write Windows code, and for users to more easily install their distros from a file or network share which is common in enterprise scenarios... With the tar based architecture, you can start with the same .tar file (which can be an exported Linux container!) and just edit it to add details to make it a WSL distro... These options will describe key distro attributes, like the name of the distro, its icon in Windows, and its out of box experience (OOBE) which is what happens when you run WSL for the first time. You'll notice that the oobe_command option points to a file which is a Linux executable, meaning you can set up your full experience just in Linux if you wish.
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Red Hat is Becoming an Official Microsoft 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' Distro More

Red Hat is Becoming an Official Microsoft 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' Distro

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  • Two words (Score:3, Insightful)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @12:47PM (#64966953)

    Alma
    Rocky

  • Did WSL ever get support for a GUI? I'm hoping for that ...

    • That's a useless feature you can already run gui applications from a WSL linux instance since 2021. You would be better off learning how to setup and run proper aliases in a headless linux install.

      I run
      Calligra (company is a google workspace shop),
      Gimp (better faster updates on linux side),
      Remmina (beats the hell out of Win RDP runs like shit in Win11),
      Firefox (as a second instance with strict privacy & tougher Ublock settings)

      and a few security tools from my Win11 desktop installed solely in WSL - Ubu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      Did WSL ever get support for a GUI? I'm hoping for that ...

      WSL2 has WSLg [github.com].

      I use it to run Linux IntelliJ IDEA from within WSL and it's not perfect but overall works quite well. The alternative of using Windows IntelliJ IDEA to access a project residing within WSL had very bad performance when I tried it.

  • A fitting pairing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @01:15PM (#64966983)

    Red Hat is the worst large Linux distro out there and Windows is, just bad.

    • It's not bad. It's just 10 years behind in all the wrong places.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tora ( 65882 )

      Having used both (still) ubuntu and rocky/EL in production AT SCALE, I can assure you I'd choose EL/rocky 10 out of 10 times. Ubuntu/debian are still suffering from being not quite there.

      A big black eye is just the autoinstall/cloud-init garbage they still hold onto. Such a nightmare compared to the ease of anaconda/kickstart. Ubuntu has already pulled a ton of things from RHEL, just pull anaconda too.

      It sucks being "almost" there and yet not.

      • Not to mention that Ubuntu seems to change their supported method of unattended installation with almost every new release - and, for some reason, occasionally chooses to retroactively disable previously supported methods on still-maintained older releases.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Yeah, they went from debian-installer, which while messy was at least powerful, to subiquity, which is still needlessly complex yet also somehow much less flexible than debian-installer.

        Also, subiquity kind of half-asses the autoinstall UI, and it's just a stupid looking mess to watch.

    • How soon will electronic stores like Best Buy start selling pcs with Red Hat license? Maybe Red Hat would be excluded of spyware like recall but don't count on it. Anything related to Microsoft is dirty.

      • How soon will electronic stores like Best Buy start selling pcs with Red Hat license? Maybe Red Hat would be excluded of spyware like recall but don't count on it. Anything related to Microsoft is dirty.

        https://www.bestbuy.com/site/r... [bestbuy.com]

        Came and went, nobody wants it.

    • I developed a distaste for red hat (and subsequently all the derivatives) in the late 90s, but I can't remember why that was. And now I can't be bothered to figure out why, but you are right, to hell with them!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chthon ( 580889 )

        I know. Compared to dpkg/apt from Debian, yum/rpm is slow and arcane. For me, that really was the main reason to never use Redhat myself.

  • EEE? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @01:19PM (#64966997) Homepage

    Is this still on track:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

    I still have no idea why would anyone what to use WSL. Running Linux on top of a OS were anything goes, no thank you.

    • It is extremely backwards, but for a lot of desktop use cases it doesn't matter. I still have some low end laptops for special Windows related purposes because they need to run some single piece of windows software, be disposable, and they don't have the resources to put Windows in a VM.

      Back when I ran Windows for gaming purposes, I used to use Linux in a VM for stuff like gparted on flash drives, usually with vmplayer.

    • It's convenient for some things. I confess, I never learned PowerShell; the syntax doesn't make any sense to me. When I have to do anything in PowerShell I google "how do you do this in powershell" and cut/paste.

      But I have many years' experience in bourne/csh/bash programming. I used Cygwin for years in cases where I needed to do something esoteric on Windows, but Cygwin is a little funky. WSL in comparison is a dream to install, and you get to use an actual, recognizable Linux distro. From within WSL,

      • Re:EEE? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @03:00PM (#64967139)

        I learned PowerShell about 10 years ago. Almost against my will.

        It took me over a year to be able to convert a line from CMD to PowerShell under 10 minutes.
        The language is a way to force admin to learn C#.

        There are lots of potholes and caveats.
        The 5.1 version still returns $true for the following: Test-Path " "

      • It might be good to look at Docker as well to use with WSL. I've found that having it use WSL is nice, especially when I'm doing something that only needs a throwaway VM, such as doing a compile, where I can have a VM spawn, provision itself, load what it needs, do the build, then exit, leaving the built artifacts in a shared directory. Part of the reason I do this is for repeatability, so I don't have to deal with "it works on my machine, why not yours?" Vagrant used to be something I would use for this

    • Re: EEE? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @02:25PM (#64967091)

      MS might push WSL as a vehicle to stop people from using alternative OSes on bare metal, so one day they can just lock down the PC ecosystem via UEFI/Secure Boot to only run Windows so they can control everything that happens on the computer, and nobody would object.

      Apple might be working towards the same goal, and they might be ahead. And MS loves copying from Apple.

      • If you can capture customers into using WSL why would you need to lock down UEFI/Secure Boot? The convenience alone should take care of that.

        The whole UEFI lockdown conspiracy is just that, pointless conspiracy. MS doesn't have the power to dictate how UEFI/Secure Boot is implemented, and forcing it to be locked down for devices outside of their first party suite would result in them getting royally arse fucked by regulators the world over as that is textbook case of anti-trust violations. We're in a world

    • Is this still on track:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

      Too late, Red Hat is already owned by IBM. There isn't much left to extinguish.

    • That tells us you've never worked in a large scale IT group inside a fortune 500.

    • No. It's quite the opposite. Linux has infected Windows just as Steve Ballmer warned us it would.

    • You like Windows because you were born in Seattle and are a C# programmer, but you like some of the features of Linux (ie, it's easier for development. It comes with half a dozen languages by default, scripting is easier, etc).

      Microsoft created WSL as a response to C# programmers deploying their websites into Linux containers on Azure.

    • Is this still on track:

      No it's not on track for three reasons:
      a) The market forces for EEE to work don't exist here. MS can neither extend nor extinguish Linux. To do either they need significant market share in the space (which they don't have since they don't actually run any of the Linux variants in WSL), and then they would need to introduce an incompatibility (which they can't because Linux is open source and available as an OS for virtually all hardware).
      b) It doesn't make sense. Why extinguish the free work of others when

    • I use WSL Debian for certain applications that work better with it than in a Windows Environment. Specifically, I use the simple version of vim that comes with Debian for all my text documents because I do not care for what is available in Windows and after leaving Quicken for my finances found Ledger-CLI to be a very suitable substitute. I have no use for most of the graphical environments in Linux as a simple layman but love the bash command line.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      WSL 1 was designed to be run under the traditional Windows NT concept of subsystems, just like how DOS, OS/2, and 16/32-bit Windows apps ran on 64-bit systems. That worked great and actually gave Linux (and those other systems) direct access to Windows services and APIs.

      But, Microsoft scrapped that in favor of the Hyper-V virtual machine WSL 2 without access to any of those Windows services and APIs.

  • Embrace, extend, extinguish

  • When I first discovered WSL, I first tried to bring up CentOS because I was doing development under Red Hat and it would be convenient to have a similar environment. But WSL at time time did not support systemd. You could get CentOS to boot but you couldn't do a lot with it. I guess that's no longer the case?

    • Maybe there's now a systemd-wsld-systemdd available.

    • Good old times...

    • Hasn't been the case for a good while.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      When I first discovered WSL, I first tried to bring up CentOS because I was doing development under Red Hat and it would be convenient to have a similar environment. But WSL at time time did not support systemd. You could get CentOS to boot but you couldn't do a lot with it. I guess that's no longer the case?

      There are two "modes" to WSL. WSL1 and WSL2. WSL1 is where the Windows kernel emulates the Linux system call interface allowing Linux binaries to run. This has compatibility issues since not all system

  • M$ Partnering With IBM - AGAIN! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @03:39PM (#64967179)

    First it was M$ partnering with IBM on OS/2 ... and we all know how that turned out.

    Now we have have M$ partnering with RedHat, aka IBM by another name, so it makes me wonder how this adventure will turn out.

  • ...the Gen 5 Glock Model 19 is becoming the official pistol with which to shoot yourself in the foot.

  • Why not use hyper-v (Score:3)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @07:03PM (#64967479)

    If you are already running Windows Server, why not just run hyper-v and spin up whatever linux distro you want on a vm? Maybe this is more geared towards desktop windows that have a need for linux. You could always just run virtualbox and pick your distro that way as well.

    Best to just avoid Windows altogether. If you must deal with it, windows it what belongs in the VM.

    • A VM and WSL are not the same thing from a user perspective, even if WSL2 is literally a Linux kernel running in hyper-V anyway. As far as the user is concerned the hyper-V option creates a self contained client isolated from the host and requires additional steps to access the host. The WSL route instead makes it appear as though Linux is effectively the host.

      The distinction is the reason programs like Cygwin existed. The desire to run *NIX software within a windows environment, not to have to spin up an e

      • Thank you. That makes sense. After I posted this, I kept reading the thread and saw another good example of using WSL and realized what you just pointed out, that it's basically running *nix applications on windows. I didn't realize that's how that worked.

        That's also a good point about the extra steps needed to allow the VM and the host to directly interact. It's not a lot of steps but using WSL to run say Bash so you could then use Bash to interact with Windows sounds like a huge win. I've been learning Po

  • Why bother... (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday November 23, 2024 @09:21PM (#64967621)
    ...with including all that Microsoft malware? Doesn't it just get in the way of a productive user experience & being able to work without interruption from clippy or AI clippy or ads or whatever the f**k they're annoying people with nowadays?
  • The "Windows Subsystem for Linux" I use is called Wine..

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