GoKawiilA nifty Windows app that boots a full Linux desktop in a window, wiring together the wslc container API, WinUI Reactor, Azure Linux 4.0, .NET 10, with a pinch of nostalgia.
I made a thing...
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I wanted to try out some of the cool stuff that came out of Microsoft Build 2026.
Azure Linux "Desktop" is a small Windows app that boots a full Linux desktop in a window. It opens, starts an embedded Linux container, and a few seconds later you are looking at a themed XFCE desktop running on Azure Linux 4.0, with working audio, GPU acceleration, copy and paste, and a display that resizes with the window. No buttons, no setup wizard, no terminal. You launch the app and you are at a Linux desktop.
I was inspired in part by Craig Loewen's Herbert demo. I had to take it a bit further because I have a problem.
I will say this up front. It is a toy. The build steps require compiling unstable WSL from main to get the container runtime early, it shoves Fedora desktop packages onto a server distribution that was never meant to have them, and it leans on an early source build of a WinUI experiment.
The four pieces
Four things from Build 2026 do the work here. Each one is interesting on its own. Together they make the demo.
The wslc container API
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