Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by petecox 3361 days ago
Obvious question, why not just run an X11 server on the host?

Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.

3 comments

That would work, but perform like caro. There are a large number of effects that need shared memory tricks to work efficiently in X. So, any "modern" desktop is going to be iffy running that way.
For windows, try mobaxterm. I tried a half dozen x11 servers a few years ago, and it was the best by far.

It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux.

Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor.

[edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]

Can't you already do that? With DISPLAY variable. Although there could be less overhead in running local (guest) X server and stream only GL commands.