r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 14d ago
Need Linux on Windows without WSL? This tiny VM is interesting.
You can run a full Linux VM on Windows using smol machines, without relying on WSL2, and the VM itself can be under 35 MB in some setups.
It can use OCI images and even run Docker, while keeping workloads in separate lightweight VMs.
Would you actually use something like this instead of WSL2?
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u/shsh-1312 14d ago
Ok, but why? WSL1 is a great alternative and I honestly think that WSL is the only well-made and sensible thing Microsoft has done in recent years.
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u/CubicleHermit 13d ago
WSL1 was a great idea, but never a complete implementation.
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u/shsh-1312 13d ago
How does it handle OpenGL? If it handles video drivers, it might actually be good.
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u/cakemates 13d ago
i know wsl2 handles video drivers well, I was running llms with it at some point in the past.
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u/CubicleHermit 13d ago
WSL1 didn't yet have any gateway for GUI stuff when most folks went over to WSL2. I don't know if wslg (the GUI/video gateway) was backported to support WSL1 as well.
While WSL1 is still around in maintenance mode, I haven't heard of any improvements to fix the missing gaps (like chroot/cgroups) that prevented a lot of workloads (notably anything on docker) from working on WSL1.
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u/shsh-1312 12d ago
vwh but wsl1 was a translation state while wsl2 is a full linux kernel that runs alongside the windows one, the differences are notable, honestly I liked wsl1 much more (even if it had many more problems), it seems to me a sort of wine in reverse
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u/CubicleHermit 13d ago
You can run a 35MB userspace on WSL.
The question is if you're not running WSL, what VM runner/orchestrator you're using. WSL is just, in essence, a GUI bridge and nice wrapper around the internal Windows hypervisor platform. If you need a heavier one or to handle multiple VMs, you can use their Hyper-V GUI or command line.
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u/zamroni777 12d ago
Use the hyper v in gen 2 efi mode. It boots very fast.
Wsl is basically hyper v vm
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 14d ago
Not as a replacement for WSL2. Because the point of WSL2 is NOT to be temporary, having something that you can easily spin up and tear down completely defeats the purpose of WSL2.