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Linux apps on Windows 10 and Chrome OS

Penguin Travel

Article from ADMIN 66/2021

By Christian Knermann

Microsoft and Google have upgraded their in-house operating systems, Windows 10 and Chrome OS, with subsystems to run Linux. We look into their highly different approaches.

Although Linux has so far failed to make the big breakthrough on the desktop, the success of the open source project is undisputed. As the foundation for countless servers, it forms the backbone of the Internet. In conjunction with the Raspberry Pi and related small-board computers, Linux is just as much a fixture in Internet of Things as it is in the smart home.

If you want to use Linux applications or develop scripts and applications yourself, you do not necessarily have to set up a full-fledged virtual or even physical system. Instead, you can set up a Microsoft or Google Linux subsystem.

WSL Version 2

An article in this issue already looks at Microsoft's version 2 of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and its use with containers [1]. WSL1 was not a big hit in terms of functionality and performance because it only provided a compatibility layer that translated Linux system calls to their counterparts on Windows (i.e., it emulated system calls). In May 2020, however, Microsoft changed the technical underpinnings in Windows 10 version 2004 and backported the new functionality to Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909 a few months later. The backport is only for the x64 platform. On ARM systems, WSL2 is reserved for Windows editions from 2004 upward.

Unlike its ancestor, WSL2 does not rely on emulation; it uses Microsoft's in-house virtual computing platform to run a native Linux kernel on a lightweight virtual machine (VM). Microsoft now serves updates for this Linux kernel in the scope of the usual Windows updates – only after you have manually installed a one-off update. That said, WSL1 has not completely disappeared; it is still there and you can switch flexibly between the worlds for each Linux distribution by upgrading and downgrading.

Basically, Microsoft recommends using the newer version and only gives a few reasons

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