A few years ago it seemed unthinkable, but right now Microsoft’s support for open source software, including Linux, seems to have no limits. The software giant has just launched WSL 2.0 with some interesting improvements, something that we are going to tell you about.
Surely many of you have already used an open source operating system in Windows itself over the last few months. Well, due to the success of this feature and its great acceptance, the company has just launched the preliminary version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux or WSL 2.0. As it could not be otherwise, here we will find a multitude of new features and corrections compared to the previous version.
It is not difficult to imagine that Microsoft itself has been working for some time to introduce a good number of changes and improvements in WSL 2.0. Of course, at this moment we must be clear that this is a preliminary version, so a good part of the new features integrated at the moment are described as experimental. To give you an idea of what we are talking about, one of the great improvements introduced here significantly reduces memory usage when running the WSL virtual machine. This is something that many will surely appreciate.
In parallel, the software giant has included some other new features related to network functions to improve your user experience. And as it could not be otherwise, the corrections to errors detected in the previous version cannot be missing here.
What’s new in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.0
In the most recent versions of Windows, users around the world make use of this feature to run Linux distributions directly on their computers based on the Microsoft system. This is a relatively recent functionality, so this version 2.0 wants to improve the user experience in this sense by introducing new and interesting improvements. Let’s look at some of the most important ones that we are going to find.
- Microsoft makes the WSL virtual machine reduce memory usage as you use it, all while reclaiming the system cache.
- A new network mode is included where the firm adds new features and improves compatibility with all types of connections.
- There have also been significant improvements to the way the WSL handles DNS requests to improve network compatibility.
- We will have the possibility to establish new firewall rules of the Windows Subsystem for Linux with advanced controls for setting up and using it.
- The official WSL store is now accessible from Session 0.
- All binaries included in the WSL package are now signed.
- The company fixes the localhost broadcast error if ipv6 is disabled on the VM.
- The message has also been corrected WSL policy error to provide update instructions.
- Now we can separate user devices before closing the virtual machine.
- Bugs detected in wslservice.exe have been fixed.
Once we know the new features included in the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.0, we can say that we can download preview version from this same link. This way we can try it right now.