[mook]

With WSL2 being a full(-ish) VM, running Android on a Linux base might be interesting (especially when using a Linux host, see the other anbox comment). Not sure how to deal with macOS though.

And yeah, as of Android Studio 3.x (was waiting for the official 4.0 release), it was trying to nudge towards using the Google Play Services images pretty hard.

[izacus]

> With WSL2 being a full(-ish) VM, running Android on a Linux base might be interesting (especially when using a Linux host, see the other anbox comment). Not sure how to deal with macOS though.

But this is pretty much what Android Emulator is - a fullish VM on a Linux base.

[2ion]

Yes, but that's different in that it's x86 on x86 so you can use hardware paravirtualization features for maximum performance (through HyperV). ARM on x86 can't use hardware virtualization features, you have to run it all in software, which is why it's slow. Big value in getting rid of the architecture mismatch.

[izacus]

Android Emulator has been (by default) x86 for years now and it's using both hardware paravirtualization and even OpenGL passthrough.

[dtech]

I thought WSL was a compatibility layer similar to Wine, not a full VM?

[moooo99]

The original WSL(1) was. However, the new version, WSL2, brings a lot of architecture changes. Now its basically a virtualized Linux running in Hyper-V. The nice thing about that new architecture is that now applications like Docker can use WSL2 to run the containers which was not possible with previous versions.

[Osiris]

WSL1 was a translation layer. WSL2 is a VM.