On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 3:14 PM Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote: > > Has anyone had any experience with the Windows Services for Linux? How does > it compare to a full fledged distro? I'm really curious, but not in a > position (yet) to experiment for myself.
I haven't really experimented with it myself, but according to my understanding, it *is* a full-fledged Linux distribution. The Windows NT kernel is a sort of hybrid one; it supports multiple "personality" modules that can expose different kernel APIs to processes. Windows Services for Linux is essentially a personality module for the kernel that implements the user-facing side of the Linux kernel API along with a Linux distribution installed to your system drive. The Windows Store apparently now has Ubuntu, SUSE, Kali and Debian variants you can install now. You can invoke a Linux-environment shell from the Windows CMD prompt and have that shell stay in the same working directory, except with access to a PATH that includes both the Windows and the Linux distro's binaries. Their documentation is pretty extensive: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about There may be some performance issues related to the filesystem translation or other aspects of the personality module implementation in the kernel, but I can't say much about those as I haven't really used it. --Levi /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
