Building Linux Workspace on Windows 10 via WSL

I was not really a fan of Windows 10,
let alone Microsoft decided to ditch the most important feature I liked in Windows 7 - Aero.
In fact, I’d admit that in most cases I use Windows as an entertainment system
rather than a working platform.

Don’t get me wrong, Windows is great, both in terms of the quality of the software
and the design/usability of the system by itself. It’s also particularly great of you are
a .NET developer, a webmaster using IIS, or a game developer heavily using DirectX.
However, it’s just cumbersome to use it as a daily OSS platform, namely there lacks the
general ecosystem and the tools are just different. Yes you can install node, java, maven,
gradle, and you can probably use powershell to write shell scripts, but at the end of the day,
the overall configuration just feels different and since most people don’t use Windows
for work on a day-to-day basis, it just takes too much time and effort to learn a set of
rules with different flavor, just to get the environment set up.

However, things have changed.

The release of WSL (Windows Subsystem on Linux) in Windows 10 was like silent bomb.
It wasn’t really marketed to general public, but it implies the fundamental
change of attitude from Microsoft towards OSS community.

WSL is not a virtual machine. In fact there’s no real linux kernel running.
Instead, there is a layer in between that translates linux system calls to
something that windows kernel can handle. Technically, this is seriously phenomenal,
as there’s certain things that there’s no direct equivalent in Windows.

For example:

Quoted from MSDN blog

The Linux fork syscall has no documented equivalent for Windows.
When a fork syscall is made on WSL, lxss.sys does some of the initial work
to prepare for copying the process.
It then calls internal NT APIs to create the process with the correct semantics
and create a thread in the process with an identical register context.
Finally, it does some additional work to complete copying the process
and resumes the new process so it can begin executing.

And another one regarding WSL file system:

The Windows Subsystem for Linux must translate various Linux file system operations
into NT kernel operations. WSL must provide a place where Linux system files can exist
with all the functionality required for that including Linux permissions,
symbolic links and other special files such as FIFOs;
it must provide access to the Windows volumes on your system;
and it must provide special file systems such as ProcFs.

And now it even supports interop
after the Fall Creators update. This means if you type in notepad.exe,
it would literally open notepad for you. Not very exciting but beyond that you could
do

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# copy stuff to clipboard
echo 'foo bar' | clip.exe

# open a file in windows using default associated program
cmd.exe /C start image.png

Awesome, but what’s our original topic?