A list of useful terms for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) ecosystem.
A
AppArmor is an effective and easy-to-use Linux application security system. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats, even zero-day attacks, by enforcing good behavior and preventing both known and unknown application flaws from being exploited.
APT (Advanced Package Tool) is a higher-level package management systemtool, that is more commonly used than dpkg as it can fetch packages from remote locations.
Ansible-WSL is an open source program that makes it easier to provision your Windows from inside of WSL by Ansible.
Arch Linux is an independently developed, x86-64 general purpose GNU/Linux distribution versatile enough to suit any role. Development focuses on simplicity, minimalism, and code elegance.
Arch Linux User Repository (AUR) is a software repository that contains thousands build scripts, for compiling nearly 68,000 installable packages from source using the Arch Linux makepkg application.
Azure CLI is a set of commands used to create and manage Azure resources.
Azure Sphere is a secured, high-level application platform with built-in communication and security features for internet-connected devices.
Awesome, a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X.
B
Btrfs is a modern copy on write (CoW) filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while also focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
Bcachefs is an advanced new filesystem for Linux, with an emphasis on reliability and robustness and the complete set of features one would expect from a modern filesystem. Scalability has been tested to 50+ TB, will eventually scale far higher.
Bspwm, a tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning with a focus on resource efficiency.
C
Canonical makers of Ubuntu Desktop and Server.
CBL-Mariner is an internal Linux distribution for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. CBL-Mariner is designed to provide a consistent platform for these devices and services and will enhance Microsoft’s ability to stay current on Linux updates.
Ceph is a software-defined storage solution designed to address the object, block, and file storage needs of data centers adopting open source as the new norm for high-growth block storage, object stores and data lakes.
Cinnamon Desktop, a Linux desktop which provides advanced innovative features and a traditional user experience.
D
Debian is an operating system and a distribution of Free Software. It is maintained and updated through the work of many users who volunteer their time and effort.
dpkg(Debian Package) is the package management system in Debian and its OS derivatives.
DEB is a Debian Software Package file used on Debian-based Linux systems such Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Pop!_OS.
DNF(Dandified Packaging Tool) is a software package manager that installs, updates, and removes packages on Fedora and is the successor to YUM (Yellow-Dog Updater Modified). DNF makes it easy to maintain packages by automatically checking for dependencies and determines the actions required to install packages.
Docker Desktop WSL 2 backend creates an architectural change that gvies a full Linux kernel built by Microsoft, allowing Linux containers to run natively without emulation.
DockerFLuent is a library that enables docker and docker-compose interactions using a Fluent API.
Dxgkrnl is a brand-new kernel driver for Linux that exposes the /dev/dxg device to user mode Linux. /dev/dxg exposes a set of IOCTL that closely mimic the native WDDM D3DKMT kernel service layer on Windows.
DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.
E
EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is an free and open source community-based repository project from the Fedora team which provides 100% high-quality add-on software packages for Linux distribution including RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS Stream.
F
Fedora is a polished, easy to use operating system for laptop & desktop computers, with a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds.
Fedora Updates System is a place to create, test, and publish package updates for Fedora.
fish shell is a friendly interactive shell. It's a smart and user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, and WSL.
FlakeHub is a platform developed by Determinate Systems for discovering and publishing Nix flakes.
FlatHub is a build and distribution service for Flatpak applications.
FreeRDP is a free remote desktop protocol library and clients.
Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which based upon Blackbox.
G
GlusterFS is a free and open source scalable network filesystem. Gluster is a scalable network filesystem. Using common off-the-shelf hardware, you can create large, distributed storage solutions for media streaming, data analysis, and other data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks.
GNOME Desktop, is an easy and elegant way to use your computer, GNOME is designed to put you in control and get things done.
H
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system that handles large data sets running on commodity hardware. It is used to scale a single Apache Hadoop cluster to hundreds (and even thousands) of nodes.
I
init is parent of all Linux processes with PID or process ID of 1. It is the first process to start when a computer boots up and runs until the system shuts down. init stands for initialization.
i3-wm, a tiling window manager for X11.
J
JuJu is an open source application modeling tool for public and private clouds. It forms part of Ubuntu's cloud portfolio, together with Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu OpenStack, MAAS for bare-metal provisioning, and Landscape for systems management and monitoring.
JAAS (Juju as a Service) is a service that makes it easy to deploy OpenStack at scale. Where you quickly and reliably build an enterprise-scale cloud running on Ubuntu.
K
KDE Plasma Desktop, is a beautiful Windows-like desktop that you use to surf the web, keep in touch with colleagues, friends and family, manage your files, enjoy music and videos; and get creative and productive at work.
L
Linux kernel is the main component of a Linux operating system (OS) and is the core interface between a computer’s hardware and its processes. It communicates between the 2, managing resources as efficiently as possible.
LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API.
LXQt Desktop,the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.
M
MATE Desktop, is the continuation of GNOME 2 desktop environment.
Mesa3D is a 3D graphics library with open-source implementations of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenCL, and more. Mesa 23.1 comes with support for several new Vulkan extensions for the Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) for AMD Radeon GPUs.
Micro DNF is a lightweight C implementation of DNF, designed to be used for doing simple packaging actions when you don't need full-blown DNF and you want the tiniest useful environments possible. Checkout the Micro DNF GitHub.
Mutter is a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library. When used as a Wayland display server, it runs on top of KMS and libinput. It implements the compositor side of the Wayland core protocol as well as various protocol extensions.
N
Nala is a commandline frontend for the APT package manager.
Nix Flake Checker is a tool from Determinate Systems that performs "health" checks on the flake.lock files in your flake-powered Nix projects. Its goal is to help your Nix projects stay on recent and supported versions of Nixpkgs.
NixOS Anywhere is a tool that let's you install NixoS everywhere via ssh on a target machine running x86_64 Linux with kexec support. If you're installing NixOS, the nixos-anywhere (formerly known as nixos-remote) tool allows you to pre-configure the whole process.
nix2container is a tool that provides an efficient container development workflow with images built by Nix: it doesn't write tarballs to the Nix store and allows to skip already pushed layers (without having to rebuild them).
O
Oh My Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration.
OSTree is an upgrade system for Linux-based operating systems that performs atomic upgrades of complete filesystem trees. It is not a package system; rather, it is intended to complement them. Checkout the OSTree GitHub.
Openbox is a lightweight, powerful, and highly configurable stacking window manager with extensive standards support.
openSUSE Leap is a brand new way of building openSUSE and is new type of a hybrid Linux distribution. Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions, and combines that with community developments to give users, developers and sysadmins the best stable Linux experience available.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is a pure rolling release version of openSUSE containing the latest "stable" versions of all software instead of relying on rigid periodic release cycles. The project does this for users that want the newest stable software.
openSUSE Kubic is a multi-purpose Standalone & Kubernetes Container Operating System based on openSUSE MicroOS. Kubic uses kubeadm to provide an easy way of configuring a Kubernetes cluster across multiple machines, while our MicroOS base keeps your operating system updated automatically, with fully atomic rollbacks if required.
openSUSE MicroOS is a Micro Service OS providing Transactional (Atomic) Updates upon a read-only btrfs root filesystem. It's designed to host container workloads with automated administration & patching.
openSUSE Build Service is the public instance of the Open Build Service (OBS) used for development of the openSUSE distribution and to offer packages from same source for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other distributions.
OpenZFS is an open-source storage platform. It includes the functionality of both traditional file systems and volume manager.
P
Pengwin is a Linux distro optimized for WSL based on Debian.
Pengwin Enterprise is an enterprise Linux solution for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that is compatible with mainstream enterprise Linux distributions.
PowerShell Core is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation and configuration tool/framework that works well with your existing tools and is optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models.
PPA(Personal Package Archive) is a set of software repositories that can distribute software and updates directly to Ubuntu users. Create your source package, upload it and Launchpad will build binaries and then host them in your own apt repository.
PipeWire is a server and user space API to deal with multimedia pipelines.It provides a low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both pulseaudio and JACK.
Pulp is a software repository platform for Fetching, Uploading, Organizing, and Distributing Software Packages.
Q
Qt is a cross-platform application development framework for desktop, embedded and mobile. Supported Platforms include Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, and iOS.
R
Red Hat makers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and sponsors to the Fedora Project.
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) the world's leading enterprise Linux platform.
RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from source into easily distributable packages installing, updating and uninstalling packaged software querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not.
RPM Fusion is a software repository provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn't want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and current Red Hat Enterprise Linux or clones versions; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit.
ROM OSTree is a hybrid image/package system. It combines libostree as a base image format, and accepts RPM on both the client and server side, sharing code with the dnf project; specifically libdnf. Thus bringing many of the benefits of both projects together.
S
SELinux is a security enhancement to Linux which allows users and administrators more control over access control.
SONiC is an open source network operating system based on Linux that runs on switches from multiple vendors and ASICs. It offers a full-suite of network functionality, like BGP and RDMA, that has been production-hardened in the data centers of some of the largest cloud-service providers.
systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.
Synaptic Package Manager is a graphical package management tool based on APT.
Simple Wireplumber GUI is a tool you can easily rename and see the properties of your audio devices if you're running pipewire as your audio server and wireplumber as it's session and policy manager.
SUSE makers of SUSE Enterprise Linux.
T
Terminal is a powerful and productive application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, WSL, etc..
U
Ubuntu is a modern open source operating system on Linux for the enterprise Server, Desktop, Cloud, and IoT developed by Canonical.
Ubuntu Core is a secure and minimal version of Ubuntu that is designed for IoT and embedded systems. Ubuntu Core updates itself and its applications automatically using snap packages exclusively to create a confined-based system.
Ubuntu on WSL is a wiki guide on getting started with the latest version of Ubuntu installed and setup on WSL for Windows 10/11
Ubuntu Pro for Azure is a premium image designed by Canonical optimized for production environments running on Azure. .
V
Visual Studio Code Remote - WSL extension lets you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as your full-time development environment right from VS Code.
Visual Studio Code Remote Development and GitHub Codespaces is a repository of development container definitions for the VS Code Remote - Containers extension and GitHub Codespaces.
W
Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users.
WSLg is the Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI and the purpose of the project is to enable support for running Linux GUI applications (X11 and Wayland) on Windows in a fully integrated desktop experience. WSLg uses the Weston compositor, which is the standard Weston compositor with a heavily expanded RDP backend, a new RAIL/VAIL shell and various bug fixes.
wslu is a collection of utilities for Windows 10/11 Linux Subsystem, such as retrieving Windows 10 environment variables or creating your favorite Linux GUI application shortcuts on Windows 10 Desktop.
wlroots-based is a compositor library and defines a large and diverse ecosystem around wlr-protocols. It implements a huge variety of Wayland compositor features and implements them right, so you can focus on the features that make your compositor unique.
WirePlumber is a modular session / policy manager for PipeWire and a GObject-based high-level library that wraps PipeWire’s API, providing convenience for writing the daemon’s modules as well as external tools for managing PipeWire.
X
XFCE Desktop, a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems.
Y
YaST is a installation and configuration tool for openSUSE and the SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions. It features an easy-to-use interface and powerful configuration capabilities.
YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a software package-management utility for Linux operating system using the RPM Package Manager.
Z
ZFS is an enterprise-ready open source file system and volume manager with unprecedented flexibility and an uncompromising commitment to data integrity.
Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter.
Zypper is a command line package manager which makes use of libzypp. It provides functions like repository access, dependency solving, package installation, etc. Zypper repositories are similar to the ones used in YaST, which also makes use of libzypp.