back to article App-y, app-y, joy, joy: Pain-free software installer Flatpak (kinda) works on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux fans, rejoice! Flatpak can now ease your dependency blues. Sort of. Lead developer Alexander Larsson has announced that software package toolkit Flatpak now works on Windows (or rather the Windows Subsystem for Linux). After a fashion. But then where would Linux users be, if it were not for the need …

  1. Oh Homer
    Trollface

    Pulseaudio not present on WSL

    Finally a good reason to switch to Windows.

    1. sml156

      Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

      Finally another check mark to put in the pro's column for WSL.

      TBH I thought pulse audio died a horrible death in the 4.4 kernel so why is this relevant in 2018

      1. David Dawson

        Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

        TBH I thought pulse audio died a horrible death in the 4.4 kernel so why is this relevant in 2018

        --

        Are you talking about pulse audio the sound server, which runs in _userspace_?

        Pulse audio runs on top of alsa, which has a kernel bit.

        Are you thinking of OSS?

        1. sml156

          Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

          Pulse audio was created around 15 years ago(Polypaudio), I don't know what the developer got but he should of got life in prison.

          1. David Dawson

            Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

            Pulse audio was created around 15 years ago(Polypaudio), I don't know what the developer got but he should of got life in prison.

            --

            interesting history lesson, but nothing to do with my question. Pulse audio has nothing to do with the linux kernel version, it was never in the kernel, it isn't in the kernel. Its all userspace.

            I've never had any issues with it, was always easy to use and worked well enough.

            Also "should *have"

            1. Teiwaz

              Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

              Pulseaudio is probably soon to be replaced by Pipewire anyway.

        2. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

          I happen to _LIKE_ OSS, thanks. It's the driver model on FreeBSD. Not sure why Linux didn't just adopt it, too. Ah, well...

          As for running things on WSL, maybe there should be a LSW or BSDSW i.e. something Microsoft writes and supports such that Windows software can run with Linux or *BSD as the OS. I'd even PAY MONEY for it.

          And yes, this means a PROPER GUI that layers itself onto X11 and does _NOT_ require Wayland!

          1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
            Devil

            Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

            Bob, Linux did use OSS for some time, but never got it to work properly.. (Inability to play multiple streams was the main one - also the reason all these userspace daemon hacks appeared)

            As typical of the Linux crowd, instead of fixing their OSS implementation, they came up with a new shiny-shiny.

            Yes, at the time they were most vocal about software portability and microsoft lock-in, they came up with ALSA (where the "L" stands for "Linux")

            When Linux people screamed for software to be portable, what they really meant was "it should run on Linux - we don't care about anything else)

            So, now Linux has all sorts of audio APIs and userspace add-on hacks, whilst FreeBSD OSS "just works" (yet has to have crappy emulation layers to cope with software written hardcoded to one of the crappy API's)

            1. hplasm
              Meh

              Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

              "..As typical of the Linux crowd..."

              Poettering is not typical of the Linux crowd...

              1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
                Trollface

                Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

                Poettering is not typical of the Linux crowd...

                :-)

                Fair point, and kudos to the commentards - I was expecting more downvotes for my cheeky cheapshot Linix dig!

          2. David Dawson

            Re: Pulseaudio not present on WSL

            I happen to _LIKE_ OSS, thanks. It's the driver model on FreeBSD. Not sure why Linux didn't just adopt it, too. Ah, well...

            ---

            Linux did use OSS. It was the original sound system. The problem was that the company developing it tried to make it closed source, which caused issues. I vaguely remember the switch being very disruptive for playing games at the time.

            One of the motivations behind user space sound servers being made, to handle both OSS and alsa and badly behaved applications taking too aggressive ownership of things.

          3. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
            Joke

            "BSDSW"

            I don't know what it is but I suspect it is painful. :-)

      2. Oh Homer

        Re: "pulse audio died a horrible death in the 4.4 kernel"

        Actually that was OSS not PulseAudio, the latter of which has never actually been in the kernel (since it's not a hardware driver, it's a sound server that merely processes output from drivers), and the former has in fact been disabled by default for years.

        Personally I just use ALSA with a simple asoundrc config that gives me access to the hardware DSP and equaliser, something I was never able to figure out with pulseaudio. If I can remember that far back, I'm pretty sure this was trivial to do with OSS too, before it jumped the shark by going proprietary and everyone abandoned it.

  2. pyite42

    This is the opposite of what is needed, of course

    The whole point is to make Windows apps work on Linux, not the other way around. This is a complete waste of time unless there is a way to use it to reduce the number of Windows licenses in use.

    1. Jason Hindle

      Re: This is the opposite of what is needed, of course

      I'm not sure what it's for, but WSL serves me a a great replacement for cmd.exe, Powershell, Winscp and so on. Perhaps it means different things to different people?

  3. sawatts

    Ren and Stimpy?

    Sod the article - how long has it been since I last saw a Ren and Stimpy reference!

  4. MacroRodent
    Linux

    Larsson explained that a lack of support for seccomp or network namespaces limits things somewhat. ... [and so and on for more missing bits]

    If you want all Linux features, the only way still is to run the real thing. But of course this was a cool hack, just to see if it can be done. Don't show this to pointy-haired bosses, who might then imagine the developers have no more need of real Linux to get work done, and ban it.

  5. MS-Surface

    Kali on WSL, in my opinion the best experience to go for, at least for now...

    https://www.kali.org/news/kali-linux-in-the-windows-app-store/

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