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by strmpnk 2218 days ago
WSL is available on Home (including WSL2, you just don’t get access to all of hyper-v even if it’s running).
1 comments

Sorry if I was unclear, I meant as in "installed by default" on a user's machine.
Not yet, but I think it is very likely that in the future installing a Linux distribution from the store will automatically install/enable WSL. Micro-distributions with a specific applications are only a small step from there.

I don't see what they have to lose. Windows is still used widely in business. But their lock-in has drastically reduced with the rise of iOS, Android, and web apps. Making Windows more attractive as a platform for developers to deploy applications, even if it is through the WSL subsystem will make Windows as a platform more competitive to these other ecosystems.

I am currently writing scientific software. But we have stopped building Windows versions, since these programs work great with WSL and it is far less effort than building these applications separately with Visual C++.

I write software that's used by human beings in businesses and building for Windows is trivial compared to maintaining additional docs and training material for managing a WSL install on users machines.

I'm currently in a weird spot with the software I distribute because the majority of the users "know enough to be dangerous" but aren't software engineers/IT professionals. We want them running code and using Linux like a pro, but there's a lot of training/documentation overhead just for our *nix builds and the friction to getting that up and running for WSL is daunting.

Luckily MS understands B2B native more than anyone else so I'm hopeful they'll have a solution eventually, but I'm not holding my breath until then.