Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux

[Phil <phil@beadling.co.uk>]

Maxim Cournoyer writes:

> cookbook.  I have fellow coworkers (not at Savoir-faire Linux, mind you
> :-)) who have yet to escape their Windows jail; giving them a taste of
> what is possible out there with Guix would probably be a real eye
> opener.  At the minimum it would present Guix as a technically viable
> alternative to Docker & friends in these circles.
>

I totally agree with this - at the moment setting on WSL2 (AFAIK) you
have 2 options:

1. Run it on-top of Ubuntu and tweak the various daemons to start on
image boot.

2. Use Busybox to bootstrap a bare-metal install of Guix without a host
Linux.


The main problem I've had with 1 is that the resulting image is produced
is very large and does not reliably install on colleague's machines.
That and Ubuntu of course is just a distraction when trying to showcase
a Guix workflow.

The problem with 2 is that last time I tried (about a year ago), this
requires you to construct your Guix image for scratch - which is an
interesting exercise but will put off the majority of users:
https://gist.github.com/giuliano108/49ec5bd0a9339db98535bc793ceb5ab4

What we need is a WSL2 image like other OSs provided which can just be
import directly into WSL2 in a push-button fashion.  I don't think
this would be particularly difficult to do, and would encourage more
people to try Guix.

It would also be useful for people who already use Guix, but have no
option but to use Windows in some circumstances - WSL2 is already very
popular to escape Windows into Linux in day-to-day workflows, when you
are unable to have a Linux desktop, and has become widely adopted even in
companies that have a Windows-only desktop policy.

Having Guix images to download and install for WSL2 would make it very
easy to showcase Guix without asking people to risk a physical
install (which can be tricky to get hardware working), or even to adopt the
full Graphical Desktop. Users don't need admin rights to install a WSL2
image, and assuming WSL2 is already enabled (for Ubuntu or whatever) it
is trivial to add any other image.  It would be nice complement to the QCOW images
already available for QEMU.

Getting ahead of myself :-) I also think providing cloud images in
formats like Amazon's AMI would encourage people to spin-up Guix and
give it whirl.  And even looking at Ubuntu's "multipass" to easily bring
Ubuntu to Windows/Mac/Linux is another way to make it easy to try Ubuntu
on any other OS with a lightweight install.