Microsoft To Support GPU Acceleration, Linux GUI Apps On WSL2

Microsoft's virtual Build conference kicked off this morning and this year brings another big improvement on the Windows Subsystem for Linux front...

Microsoft announced they will be supporting Linux GUI applications with WSL2 and that there will be GPU-accelerated support available.

In H2'2020, Microsoft will be offering GPU compute support for WSL2 software with a focus on AI / machine learning workloads. Linux graphical applications will also be natively supported on WSL2 although the technical details are light at the moment.

At least with how Microsoft is talking it up, Linux GUI applications should "just work" under WSL2 without the need for any third-party software, unlike past work by the community on getting an X11 server working with WSL.

Interesting advancements for WSL2 on Windows 10 coming ahead, but we are eager to hear more technical details on their GPU support and GUI application handling in the months ahead.

In other interesting Microsoft news from Build today, Microsoft also announced the Windows Package Manager Preview. Winget is a new command line utility for being able to serve as a package manager / application installer similar to APT, DNF, etc.

UPDATE: More details in Microsoft Announces Direct3D 12 For Linux / WSL2.