
X410 – X Server for Windows 10 - zdw
https://x410.dev
======
cercatrova
For a somewhat alternative if you want to run both Linux and Windows, you can
run Linux natively and then run Windows in a VM with GPU passthrough. Then you
can use Looking Glass which sends the Windows pixels to a Linux window with
native performance. For the Linux machine, you can run it as a host or use
something like Proxmox as a hypervisor if you need more VMs or containers. I
use this setup to run Windows, macOS and Linux simultaneously, macOS mostly
for iOS development.

[https://looking-glass.hostfission.com](https://looking-glass.hostfission.com)

~~~
ktpsns
This sounds really fantastic. Can you explain a bit more about the hardware
requirements? If I have a decent notebook with an Intel-integrated GPU, how
can I both passthrought the GPU to the VM and use it for rendering the GUI on
the host?

~~~
cercatrova
It won't really work for laptops, at least without a lot of research and
fiddling. You need a desktop with at least one GPU, for the guest. If you want
to run the host as GUI, instead of headless, then you need a GPU for the host
as well. You can shut down each guest and boot up another one but generally
you'll need a GPU for each guest you want to run with a GUI, if you want
proper hardware acceleration and if you want to run them simultaneously. I run
on a 4 GPU system for example, one for the host and 3 for each OS.

However, for certain Intel systems, there is something called GVT-g which
allows sharing one GPU with both the host and guest, as you mentioned. You can
try that and see if it works, I'm not sure if it does on a laptop. Or if you
don't really need GPU acceleration, just make a VM as you normally would. I
suspect since you don't say whether the notebook has a dedicated GPU that you
don't game and thus wouldn't necessarily need GPU acceleration.

~~~
stragies
"for certain Intel systems" makes it sound rare.
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_GVT-g](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_GVT-g)
says, anything Broadwell and up should work, so any device from 2015+ should
work for creating vGPUs, and thus be able to use native acceleration at host
and vm-guest level!

~~~
cercatrova
Yes, but is that also the case for mobile Intel CPUs? I was unsure so I said
"some" rather than "most."

~~~
heavyset_go
GVT-g works on my mobile Intel GPU.

~~~
stragies
Do you, or anyone, happen to know, if WSL2 (=HyperV), or any other Hypervisor
on Windows supports GVT-g (well), so that (wsl2) linux applications running
on-guest can benefit from hardware assisted rendering?

~~~
cercatrova
WSL 2 does not support GPU pass through currently. I'm not sure if Hyper V
does either, but this seems like it will change soon due to Windows 10 X.
There has been development where for emulated Win32 apps they do use GPU /
hardware acceleration. Sadly, with the the Neo being delayed past 2020, we
might not see it until next year.

------
kdamica
I've been using VcXsrv
([https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/))
to do the same thing for a few months. It works well in most cases, but it can
be janky. The scaling doesn't always work well if you're using a hidpi screen,
and I had one application that was crashing consistently under certain
circumstances.

Definitely going to try this out, but I wonder if it's worth paying for when I
have a free alternative that does most of what I need it to do.

~~~
kingosticks
I've been using it for literally years to access the GUIs of programs running
on Linux workstations from my Windows 10 machine over our LAN. I don't think
it's ever crashed for me with the 3 or 4 programs I run but it's sometimes a
little slow, although I'm not convinced that's the fault of vcxsrv. I have no
other problems with it, my experience with scaling has been surprisingly good.
I see no reason to pay for an alternative.

~~~
kdamica
My crash happened whenever I tried using a Matlab MLX file (which are similar
to Jupyter notebooks in Matlab, if you aren't familiar). Since I don't use
them much, this was easy to work around. Not clear to me whether the problem
was Matlab or VcXsrv.

------
syockit
I (and most of my colleagues) stopped using vcxsrv at my workplace since we
moved from Qt4 to Qt5. At some point in between, Qt stopped supporting native
X11 painting[1] which means all of the graphics are now drawn as bitmap at
server side and sent in whole to the client. That easily hoses up our network.
The problem is more exarcebated now that Japan has declared state of emergency
and everyone is urged to work from home. We now resort to using VNC solutions.
(I wish we had developed a curses client along with the GUI for times like
this)

[1]
[https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-50338](https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-50338)

~~~
jamesfmilne
X also doesn't really work if you UI is implemented with OpenGL or similar.

I've been using NoMachine and it works very well. Others I know are using
Teradici, or HP Remote Graphics.

~~~
datenwolf
> X also doesn't really work if you UI is implemented with OpenGL or similar.

Depends on how you use the OpenGL API. OpenGL display lists, once compiled,
are extremly light on the connection. However they're also deprecreated and no
longer supported in (forward compatible) OpenGL-3.3 core. But then again
there's no 3.3 GLX specification.

~~~
jamesfmilne
For the stuff I'm doing (image processing), indirect GL is not an option.

~~~
exikyut
What about VirtualGL? [https://www.virtualgl.org/](https://www.virtualgl.org/)

As I understand it, when you open an OpenGL application inside Xvnc (et al) on
:1, a shim is LD_PRELOADed that quietly redirects the OpenGL initialization
calls so they create an offscreen buffer associated with Xorg at :0 (which is
presumably sitting on a 3D-capable GPU).

Said Xorg can be displaying a black screen (or be being used for arbitrary
purposes); no windows are ever displayed on it. Theoretically, avoiding
compositing WMs may aid performance.

~~~
notyourday
I am using it with qemu to allow Linux guests to use hosts's gpu to do 3d
acceleration. It works fairly well except that it seems there is a memory leak
in the path somewhere because over time qemu VMs with it enabled grow over the
memory allocated to them.

~~~
exikyut
Wait, how does that... ohh, you're forwarding GLX. Ha, that's awesome, I am
definitely borrowing that idea :)

The graphics contexts should be well-contained on the host though. That the
_guest_ is leaking memory is kind of interesting.

~~~
notyourday
This is qemu 4.2.0 configure command line that built what i needed to support
this ( Debain 10's qemu did not have virgl support ). Spice did not work me,
SDL did.

    
    
      PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/virgl-0.8.1/lib/pkgconfig/ ./configure --prefix=/opt/qemu-4.2.0 --enable-spice --enable-kvm --enable-linux-aio --target-list=x86_64-softmmu --enable-sdl --enable-gtk --enable-opengl --enable-virglrenderer --extra-ldflags=-L/opt/libepoxy-1.5.4/lib/
    

And this is the command line to launch a guest:

    
    
      export QEMU_PA_LATENCY_OUT=20
      export QEMU_PA_SAMPLES=44100
    
      ${QEMU_BIN} -name "${NAME}" -m size=${RAM_SIZE} -machine accel=kvm -drive format=raw,aio=native,cache=none,if=virtio,file=${VMDIR}/${VM} -netdev tap,id=mynet0,ifname=${VMTAP},script=no,downscript=no -device e1000,netdev=mynet0,mac=${VMMAC} -vga virtio -display sdl,gl=on -soundhw hda -audiodev pa,id=pa1
    

Oh and when I say it is working "fairly well" I mean the a guest with a single
vCPU runs a spinning cube with no sweat, not to mention glxgears etc. Just for
a test I have done 4 guests ( one per physical core ) doing gears and spinning
cube each in addition to the host itself doing spinning cube with no issue.

If only I could figure out how to fix this memory leak.

~~~
exikyut
Arg, only noticed your reply yesterday then the tab got buried!

Thanks for the info. I probably don't have the hardware setup to run VMs at
the moment (chronically low on RAM + do not have a GPU). I will be _very_
interested to play with this when that changes in the future.

The one question (if you notice this) I do have is: how quickly does the
memory leak happen? And can just running glxgears do it?

~~~
notyourday
I'm running 32GB system with two browser VMs getting 4G each.

The work VM which is typically connected to Github and work gmail needs to be
restarted once every couple of days.

The play VM which would have a Chromium with a dozen tabs open can can take
~20 min to ~1 hour depending on the content in tabs.

I notice the memory leak when Sublime that I run on the host itself starts
dropping key press speed ( I run "xset r rate 400 50" ). Killing VMs or
restarting them makes everything go back to normal.

I've ran glxgears for ~2 hours now with no significant leak. I will probably
leave it overnight to see if something as simple as it can be used as a leak
example.

I'm going to speculate the key is heavy usage of GLX something that only
Chromium does as I have left a desktop with an xterm running top for two days
and no leaks were detected on a play vm. So it is not just virtgl in QEMU
being exposed to the guest, initialized by the guest and interfaced by the
guest via virtio, but actually using virgl on a host to do rendering. Maybe
virtual context creation/release cycle?

P.S. I originally made this work on my super light laptop ( i7-6500U with 8G
), so you don't need a beefy rig for it although there's a bug in recent Intel
GPU libraries used by mesa that sometimes lock it up. I initially attributed
it to something I did but it was not:

[https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4641](https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4641)

kitty, alacritty, and even Chromium would sometimes lock up with intel iGPUs.

Feel free to reach out - my email address in a profile here. I check it here
and there.

~~~
exikyut
Hmm.

"Depending on the content in tabs". Might be interesting to graph the leak
rate (in KB/min or MB/min) and maybe either record the screen or limit to one
or two websites at a time to narrow down what causes the most issues. Besides
video playback, CSS animations come to mind as a potential source of GLX
acceleration caused by random/mainstream websites.

Now I'm wondering what would happen if you fired up multiple tabs with stuff
from [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/),
[https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/chrome](https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/chrome),
[https://webglsamples.org/](https://webglsamples.org/), etc >:)

Virtual context creation+release could indeed be the problem. FWIW
[https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-
interface](https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface) makes using
Chrome's remote debug protocol (to open and close tabs) utterly trivial; or
you could just run multiple concurrent browsers with --user-data-dir=somewhere
(probably actually much easier to work with).

Chromium aside, another potentially useful trigger may be Unity games - the
last(/first/only) time I tried to fire one up my laptop (i5-3360M + HD
Graphics 3000) I was scrambling for ^C^C^C while everything slowed to a crawl
and the system climbed (impressively quickly) past 97°C ;) (thankfully(!)
nothing froze - thanks for the Intel lockup reference), so perhaps that could
be a very effective trigger.

I'll keep your email address in mind; email is a bit of a long-term sore point
due to Gmail constantly slowing everything to a crawl, and I'm currently using
8GB of swap (need to close some tabs) so I replied here so I could respond in
a timely manner.

------
improv32
What differentiates x410 from other x servers is that it support communication
over VSock, which Hyper-V supports, and it's probably 3x less latency than
tunneling x over ssh. Made it possible for me to comfortably use emacs in my
hyper-v arch vm

------
stragies
I wish, there was a standard URL suffix for "Pages for Techies", like
"/techspecs", or similar.

Whenever I go to a Product-Page like this one, I'm instantly turned off by the
flashiness and wordy prose.

I want a feature list, in text form, not an intro-movie!

Before closing the tab i did notice though, that this product seems
interesting, and I would have liked to read more about it.

~~~
nycticorax
Yeah, it's funny how often I end up going to the Wikipedia page of a company
or product to find out what they're selling in plain language.

~~~
stragies
The solution would be easy: Put the flashy stuff in a div with ID "advert",
and the ad-blocker will hide it from view. All non-techies gets the intro-
movie.

Anyway: Here is the list of things I gathered from the comments (iiuc):

* Uses a fork of x.org with support for legacy Windows version removed.

* Costs 10$ if you find it on sale, 50$ otherwise.

* Can be installed on 10 PCs.

* Can be installed/updated via the AppStore.

* Has a windowed mode.

* Well-integrated into Windows 10 and WSL.

* Takes advantage of HyperV virtio vsock for small latency enhancement.

* If VcXsv or XMing are unstable for you, file a bugreport, and try if X410 is more stable.

* Cannot make use of hardware assisted rendering, because of underlying WSL limitation w.r.t GVT-g in some HW configurations

------
tomxor
This is getting weird, you pay for windows to use WSL then pay $50 for an X
server clone... who wants to try this hard to not use the Linux kernel?

~~~
drewstiff
WSL 2 now _does_ use the Linux kernel.

~~~
HelloNurse
True, and it counts as trying really, really hard.

------
decafbad
VcXsrv works well for me
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/)

------
forgotpwd16
This is commercial and there are no features mentioned to prefer it over the
excellent VcXsrv.

~~~
en4bz
VcXsrv doesn't work well with HDPI scaling which this claims to support out of
the box.

------
uk_programmer
I've been using XMing for years (there are probably better options out there
but it works for me) and there is of course vcxsrv as other people have
mentioned.

It looks nice and all, but there are plenty of free options available that
will do the same.

~~~
naikrovek
If only xming and vcxsrv would stop crashing...

------
jdellinger
Does anyone want to share how they use the WSL2 & X-Server combination?

In my case, I'm mostly happy with the VSCode WSL2 integration. I keep all my
projects on the linux fs and it is fast to work with. The only thing which
annoys me is the window management in Windows. Too much Mouse movement and
random ALT-TAB-ing.

I've never got i3 to work with a Windows x server on multiple displays with
high dpi. X401 also only supports a single display.

~~~
skrebbel
I'm curious, I always thought that devs who choose Windows do so because they
like the window management and the UI tools etc. That's my reason for sure.
What's stopping you from just running proper Linux with VS Code, if you don't
like the way the Windows shell works?

~~~
gridlockd
The strongest argument for Windows is not its window management or UI tools,
it's that you can use third-party software without dealing with too much
bullshit.

On Linux, if your third-party software is available at all, it's on some third
party repo you have to add manually, or maybe it's a binary which may or may
not work on your particular distribution on your particular version.

This is basically the reason why I gave up on Linux on the desktop, it just
hasn't gotten better in decades, it probably will never get better. The
distributions have no incentive to make this work well, because first-party
packages are a big selling point.

I'll take a crappy default shell over that.

~~~
erinaceousjones
(After re-reading my own comment, I don't think I'm particularly rebuking what
you said, it's turned into a "I hate computers" vent :-))

In my eyes, how Windows and Linux deal with third party software is
identical...

The Windows model forever has been "you just double click an .exe or an .msi
and it runs".

i.e. outside of stuff published on Windows Store (which many developers will
not do), it's down to the developer to:

\- Distribute their software and provide an update mechanism (download an exe?
Windows Store? chocolatey? Steam / epic games launcher / origin / uplay?
jetbrains toolbox? adobe software updater?)

\- Deal with the many different environments (i686 vs x84, Windows XP / 7 / 8
/ 10 / 10 Home / 10 Pro / 10 Pro N* / 10 Basic Server Education Edition N RT
for phones)

\- (Probably) bundle their software with the _exact_ version of the libraries
they're using (looking at you, "Installing Microsoft VC Redist" and DirectX,
every single game that I run), because any in /system32 might be the "wrong"
ones

* 10 Pro N = "without media essentials" or something, which I stupidly chose last time I forked out the money for a Windows license. Every time there's a new major Windows update (assuming it doesn't repeatedly fail to update, forcing me to reinstall from scratch,) I need to go and reinstall the Media Feature Pack so Rockstar Launcher and GTAV and $software don't all fail to launch with an obscure error code that means one of 100 things that some corporate web forum rep will not have the answer to... Because none of them put a .log file somewhere ...

So the fact that stuff "just runs" better on Win is more to do with third
party developer effort rather than a failing of the OS and distribution.
There's no incentive for microsoft to make it work better either, because it's
Not Their Problem. A whole slew of software runs like bullshit on Windows too,
but we just kind of accept it as it is...

Yet me running a program by installing Wine and double clicking the .exe, or
via mono, or running one via a snap image, or an .AppImage, or a docker image
(those 3 are essentially containerized environments which should work
regardless of distro as they bundle their own libraries a la the windows dll
hell, though your kernel version may cause issues, just like windows driver
versions do), or my Linux distro's packages... is apparently jumping through
more hoops than Windows?

As a power user of both OS'es, they're just as much a pain in the ass as each
other.

~~~
rfoo
One key difference is the OS <-> application interface is defined as a group
of system provided dynamic libraries on Windows, not syscalls. So Windows
effectively provides a set of very reliable core libraries that is guaranteed
to be backward compatible. And as long as you don't use newly added APIs, also
forward compatible. While on Linux even libc is decoupled from the kernel,
each distribution uses a different version, the application cannot distribute
its own libc in any sane way, and the glibc choose to use ELF symbol version
to make incompatible changes to frequently used APIs (like memcpy), sabotage
bidirectional compatible attempts.

Oh, and there are only one Windows distribution. Not at least 3 major ones.

These both make packaging for Linux hard (requiring kinda funny solutions
wrapping up a sysroot as a whole, like Snap or AppImage), while on Windows,
the developer builds an exe, and voila, it works everywhere, even on very old
systems. There are simply no funky stuffs e.g. glibc symbol version issue.

------
gramakri
This is much cheaper than hummingbird exceed. It used to costs 1000s iirc.

~~~
jandrese
exceed was a pretty terrible server too. Really glitchy. Once I discovered
Xming I never looked back.

------
dlkmp
I don't fully understand what this is capable of. Can I use this to run a
window manager like xmonad? If so, does it work only for linux gui apps run
through WSL or also for windows programs?

I really love what WSL has been doing so far and this would really take it to
the next level. I'd actually consider switching my private computer to
Windows.

~~~
tjoff
Haven't been using this specifically but it looks similar enough to vcxsrv.

To me the big selling points of both this and vcxsrv is using seamless windows
so that the windows are just like any other windows-window and not like VNC or
something where you get two desktops - one for local and one for remote.

In vcxsrv, and it seems this one as well, can also run a window manager. I
tried i3 that way, but it is quite clunky and the shortcuts collided with
windows native shortcuts in a bad way. Maybe there are fixes for that. But it
will would still only be for linux apps and not windows apps.

------
joyfulmantis
They are asking $50 for something that there are other open source solutions
for. It would be interesting to find out how much of the original source code
is the developers and how much is just repackaging of one of the multitude of
open source X servers for Windows that are currently available.

Originally thinking it was another open source project, I looked at the
website to see if there were some features that would be worth it to switch
from VcXsrv. Mostly it talked about how there was a windowed mode that allowed
seamless integration with Windows. Wow how revolutionary! /s

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The most successful open source company ever (RedHat) made their whole
business packaging up open source in a nice manner.

People will pay for convenience and polish. Also, i would guess that Windows
users are not likely to be free software purists and just wants something that
works with a minimum of fuss.

The price of software should be based on the value it provides to the user,
not on what it cost to make it.

~~~
fragmede
That glosses over RedHat's strong arm sales tactics of the community, and
rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL,
is liable for your support license to not get renewed. And where's the Red Hat
kernel source in a digestible format? I haven't followed recently, but they
were at one point distributing their diffs to the mainline kernel as a single
giant patch file and arguing that it was okay. It may abide by the letter of
the GPL, but it's against the spirit of interoperability.

RedHat's the first billion dollar Linux company, but first and foremost it's a
business. Their sales people are aggressive and their lawyer's hungry. Support
contracts don't exactly fly off the shelves, especially when there's a huge
community of experts.

How many people do you know that have given money to Canonical for Ubuntu?

~~~
beagle3
I've given money to Canoncial for Ubuntu.

Also, RedHat stopped providing detail changelogs and started doing just one
bug diff dump after Oracle started hurting their business -- where Oracle's
work at the time was basically repackaging RedHat's work and doing "sed
s/RedHat Enterprise Linux/Oracle Unbreakable Linux". RedHat did what it felt
needed to fend that off.

Up until that time, they were publishing their internal repositories.

~~~
alsobrsp
While I agree with the criticism of Redhat, Oracle's behavior was shitty. I'll
have remember this next time I land on a "Support Contract Only" Redhat
knowledge base page. Oracle is just a bully.

------
sabrehagen
If someone could make Windows applications render on an X Server I'd be so
happy.

~~~
zetalemur
That's what Wine does (and it often works surprisingly well).

~~~
sabrehagen
I run Windows applications that require USB hardware, and Wine does not
support USB devices. so I was hoping for native Windows execution rendered to
an X Server.

~~~
asveikau
Run windows in a VM with USB pass through?

~~~
stjohnswarts
this is what I do. It works for a lot of USB devices, but not always.

------
oskenso
Has no one heard of moonlight? With an Nvidia card you can attach windows
remote desktop - mstsc.exe to it and bam, nvenc encoded dynamic bitrate low
latency remote desktop fully functional with audio!

~~~
mkl
That seems totally unrelated. This is primarily for running Linux GUI apps in
WSL (i.e. locally), which is otherwise terminal only. Moonlight looks
interesting but doesn't serve the same purpose at all.

------
zennit
What are you guys using this for mostly?

~~~
toast0
I haven't used this Xserver, but I've used most (all?) of the free Xservers
for Windows over time.

As background Windows is my preferred desktop environment for about the last
ten years[1], but I do most of my "real work" on FreeBSD or Linux; having an
Xserver on windows means I can do graphical work and have it mostly work.

Utilitywise, I can do things like running an image viewer to see what pictures
I have in a directory.

I run mythtv; most of the administration can be done through the TV facing
interface or the web interface, but some things need to be done with mythtv-
setup; it runs terribly over remote X (for no good reason), but at least it
runs.

I was writing a terrible NES emulator for fun, having an Xserver meant I could
write it where I'm comfortable writing software, and display it where I'm
comfortable with a desktop.

I'm writing a terrible operating system, which I run with QEMU for the time
being; the VGA console is an X window (I support serial console and it's
better than VGA, but I like to keep an eye on the VGA, because I'd like to run
it on some of my home systems, and they don't all have serial ports).

[1] Although Microsoft seems to be trying to push people away again, running
on the default platform has a lot of benefits.

~~~
datnoblesavage
What benefits do you see from running windows? I really see none as a software
dev and os enthusiast. The only reason I kept windows so long was for a game
that I stopped playing 2 years ago, and the only reason I have to use it now
is because the company I currently work in has made us use it. WSL makes me
embarrassed to show my work colleague how good linux/vim/tmux really is (but
that might be because the laptop's 8gb is almost totally used up by invisible
processes (whereas the wsl portion uses around 500mb!))

~~~
jiggawatts
It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is
literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux.

Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is
developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems.

Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of
developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of
the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think
MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is
the only shell.

I have the same reaction when I see some documentation with instructions on
"how to set up Kerberos support" that _doesn 't even mention_ Active
Directory. It's as if the authors came from some alternate reality, a parallel
Earth where Windows Server isn't quite literally 99.9% of all deployed
Kerberos authentication systems.

I'm a consultant that gets to visit many different types of organisations, big
and small, many with on-site or outsourced development teams. Almost all of
them use Windows, develop in C#, VB, or Java and deploy on IIS or various Java
platforms, but still on Windows. There are a handful that use the LAMP stack
or WordPress, but these are few and far between.

Try Visual Studio and C#, focusing on its strengths like the "async" keyword.
Try writing a little web app using the latest .NET Core and MS SQL Server
2019. Try adding some ColumnStore indexes on your data and point PowerBI at
it. The performance will _blow your mind_.

PS: All of the above are free, and/or free for developers:

[https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/)

[https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-
core](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-
downlo...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-
serve...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-
management-studio-ssms)

[https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-
us/downloads/](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/)

~~~
_ph_
Yes, the "desktop" is basically Windows with some traces of Macs :). For
server-like systems, Linux has pretty much "won" though. Which probably is the
reason why MS is working on WSL. There are also a lot of GUI applications,
which run mostly on Linux because their work domain fits in a server-like
setup - and be it even for data protection reasons where the applications are
running on a server cluster accessed by a remote protocol like Citrix.

------
ThePhysicist
There are several free alternatives like vcxsrv
([https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/))
that I used in the past in combination with WSL to work with a proper gnome
shell instead of the WSL bash shell (that doesn’t have tabs and many other
niceties). Works pretty well except maybe for high DPI environments.

------
zeppelin101
Bought this after seeing the pretty solid reviews here on this thread. I've
been using VcXsrv with no problems thus far. But I really like that this
project's website has nice documentation. Also, this works with no
configuration required (other than the 'DISPLAY' line in the WSL bash config),
which is a nice convenience. I hope this product continues to evolve and
receives constant updates.

------
meitham
Cygwin/X can be made to listen to TCP with the option ‘’-listen tcp‘’ and can
work great on WSL, multi-window mode and two directions clipboard.

------
saboot
I was convinced to buy this when I came across their article on a simple and
fast setup for getting Linux gui apps to run along side my windows desktop

[https://x410.dev/cookbook/wsl/xidekick/](https://x410.dev/cookbook/wsl/xidekick/)

Been using that for about a year now, love it

~~~
erikbye
It's about the same setup for all the other servers.

------
sz4kerto
I wanted to buy this but MS Store asks me to 'associate an address with my
profile', then shows a dialog where I can only select US addresses. I already
have a non-US address assoc'd with my MS account, so I don't know what am I
doing wrong.

Edit: nevermind, I had to change the store region on the web. I hate this :)

------
reanimus
I've been using VcXsrv to run remmina on my desktop for a while now, but it's
been having issues where windows will disappear and won't return without
relaunching. I'm giving this a spin to see if it works; if it does, I'll
happily fork over ten bucks for it. :)

------
jpeeler
This seems relevant given that Wayland is the future:
[https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/938](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/938)

------
Lammy
Nice to see this on here. I really enjoy using this as well as Token2Shell
(SSH client) from the same dev:
[https://token2shell.com/](https://token2shell.com/)

------
kpocza
This way X and music also works:
[https://github.com/kpocza/LoWe](https://github.com/kpocza/LoWe)

Of course, it's a bit circumstantial...

------
WhyNotHugo
Wow, this looks really cool.

I'm honestly really wondering how they got hidpi support, since, AFAIK, Xorg
did not support hidpi (this one of the new things Wayland brought to the
table).

~~~
AshamedCaptain
There's absolutely no reason why Xorg "does not support hidpi". It even
supports differing DPIs per screen. It does not support however _overriding_
the DPI individually per screen, but this would be trivially solved by
standarizing toolkits on some other property (either a plain property or a
fancy xrandr extension).

------
selfishgene
Has anyone compared X410 performance over VSOCK to FreeRDP's Thincast
Workstation, which is an "optimized for graphics" remix of Virtual Box?

------
ilitirit
Does anyone have a guide to getting i3 to work using this?

~~~
ilitirit
Sorry, can't edit the original post any more, but it turns out this is quite
simple.

1\. Start a WSL terminal

2\. [https://x410.dev/cookbook/wsl/setting-up-wsl-for-linux-
gui-a...](https://x410.dev/cookbook/wsl/setting-up-wsl-for-linux-gui-apps/)

3\. Start X410 in floating mode

4\. sudo apt update

5\. sudo apt install i3

6\. i3

------
erikbye
The free version of MobaXterm works great.

------
selfishgene
Are VSOCK connections available yet in any open source remote X desktop
solutions?

Xpra, X2Go, VcXSrv, Cygwin, FreeRDP, ...

------
forgotmyname11
Does this allow me to run Linux GUI applications in Docker for Win and have
the X output routed to this?

~~~
LucidLynx
Yes, but if you need sound, I think that the Audio driver is not publicly
available...

------
zhangsen
Is it feasible to run cuda dependent code using WSL and this X Server?

------
cordite
How does this website prevent me from zooming in on iOS?

~~~
rym_
In general why do sites or apps feel the need to block this, drives me nuts.

~~~
skrebbel
It used to be the case that if zooming was enabled, every normal tap would
have a 300ms delay on iOS Safari. Iirc they fixed that since (not sure how,
can anyone recall?). But basically most mobile web apps built a few years ago
would disable zoom so they got snappy interaction.

------
lerpapoo
windows on linux or linux on windows...WHO will WIN?

~~~
jng
Is there even a doubt? Windows has a chance at supporting the open, documented
interfaces of Linux. Linux has no chance at supported the closed, undocumented
interfaces of Linux.

~~~
pritambaral
> the closed, undocumented interfaces of Linux.

Perhaps you meant "Windows"?

~~~
jng
Indeed, thanks for the correction.

------
boksiora
why its not free ? :(

------
29athrowaway
I hope this motivates people to fully transition to Linux.

There's a lot of FUD around Linux. Just install it and see for yourself.
You'll never need Windows again.

~~~
Jonnax
What if I want to play a game? I gotta hope proton supports it.

Or use Photoshop, Lightroom or any other non Linux creative application. I
guess I gotta learn the free alternatives.

Also how's video acceleration in the browsers? Can I play a 4k60fps video?

Is there HDR support?

I use Linux everyday. But misrepresenting the desktop experience isn't going
to get people to switch.

~~~
erikbye
> I use Linux everyday. But misrepresenting the desktop experience isn't going
> to get people to switch.

I really enjoy the endless battle with tearing, which sometimes is fixed,
other times not. I also enjoy the battle of multi-monitor setup with different
DPIs and scaling issues, mixing 1440p and 4k monitors.

As for browser hardware acceleration, hell, even on Windows, Firefox (on my
end, and for many others) have stopped being able to play Youtube 4K videos
without stutter.

As for games, those who want to game from their Linux install without using
Proton can always run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough, that should add fun
for days (in terms of configuration).

~~~
29athrowaway
I use Linux every day and your narrative doesn't add up.

I haven't done any configuration other than installing the GPU driver, that
comes conveniently packaged in my distro. I don't have a Windows VM. I don't
have a last generation video card or anything of the sort. This is my
perspective:

1) HiDPI issues are indeed annoying, but in 2020 much of it is gone.

2) I don't have the video problem you are describing. 4K 60 fps YouTube videos
play just fine on Firefox.

3) Some games are not compatible with Wine or Proton, sure. But the
compatibility is getting better. See the list here:
[https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/)

For the people not familiar with Proton: everything you have to do is just
open Steam, and open the game you want to play... that's all. Steam will run
the game for you using Proton.

I haven't tried Doom eternal, but the previous Doom from 2016 runs out of the
box with 60 fps, and I didn't have to touch any out-of-game configuration.
Just installed it via Steam.

For Blizzard games like StarCraft II and Diablo run very well via WINE.

~~~
yrro
Come back to me when the UFO moves smoothly on this page:
[https://www.testufo.com/mprt#size=8](https://www.testufo.com/mprt#size=8)

~~~
AshamedCaptain
Even with an old Intel IGP it moves smoothly at 4k, framerate locked at 60fps
of course. And this has nothing to do with "YouTube videos" which is a
completely different animal.

~~~
yrro
Well here with 'Intel Corporation HD Graphics 620 (rev 02)' it's awful in
Firefox and still has the odd hitch every few seconds with Chromium. Youtube
videos are likewise not smooth.

~~~
paulcarroty
Firefox now supports video HW acceleration in Wayland. Also patch is available
for Chromium, Brave merged it.

Of course Linux still has "desktop" issues, but definitely not Youtube-
related.

