That's like recommending Office via Wine in 2001.

Not in the slightest. WSL is capable for most things.

Wine in 2001 was not usable

At that time I used it to play StarCraft and burn CDs with Nero Burning ROM, on Slackware. It was indeed usable!

The problem with wsl is that its a window like a small island extending 1000m into the air, and the moment you step off... Splat, you're back in Windows with the registry and such. I bought a surface a few weeks back - wsl is nothing but an improved cygwin, of no use to Linux/Mac users, and windows has become repulsively spammy. I've installed arch.

Can you use graphical applications with WSL?

While I don’t recommend WSL for serious production workloads, yes you can X11 forward applications from WSL and there’s a few implementations that are really good, all things considered.

If you install an X server for Windows, yes.

I've purchased X410 for this. Since then I haven't looked to see if there are free implementations of an X server that work nicely with WSL.

X servers pays along with WSL as well as with anything else. I've used Xming and VcXsrv with WSL without any problem specific to WSL.

As said elsewhere, I've had excellent X11 experience with WSL2 at least thanks to the open-source VcXsrv.

Bullshit, I played DeusEx a few months later just fine.

[Off Topic] Deus Ex had a profound effect on me growing up, and probably shaped my views which last to this day. Unfortunately, very few games like that are made nowadays.

Playing a specific game or 100 on it != a translation layer from one OS to another is ready or generally usable.

Games have minimal dependencies re OS APIs wise. Office apps and other programs make far more extensive use of OS facilities...

So hardly "bullshit".

> Games have minimal dependencies re OS APIs wise.

Sure, if you exclude "let's use every little quirk and undocumented feature in the graphics and audio and input stacks we can find because gotta go fast sanic noises".

Both games and office software (ab)use OS APIs; the difference is the specific subset of those APIs said programs (ab)use.

So yeah, you're right that it ain't "bullshit", but don't write off games as somehow "easy" compared to office programs; a substantial amount of effort has been poured into reimplementing Windows' multimedia stack in Wine and continues to be poured even now.

DirectX9 is not easy at all, it's almost Glide/Vulkan like low level-ish API. But hey. that's "bullshit". My balls. The above user should try running a pure DX9 game with Wine and GL 2.1 on a Intel Mobile 4 series with no noticeable frame drops. I tried. Hard.

But also, having DX7/8 being almost 100% compatible back in the day was a huge step on stability vs Windows 98, even if the RAM and CPU usage were higher. DX run fast, so did Max Payne.

It works great under WSL, but as others note, it needs first-class Windows support to really take off.

Wsl is good for webdev. Not something that you will use in production. And certainly not for other usecases like gamedev

That's not good enough.