It will make the Docker experience for developing with containers even greater, unlock new capabilities, and because WSL 2 works on Windows 10 Home edition, so will Docker Desktop.
We are very excited about this technology, and we are happy to announce that we are working on a new version of Docker Desktop leveraging WSL 2, with a public preview in July. The Docker daemon runs well on it with great performance, and the time it takes from a cold boot to have dockerd running in WSL 2 is around 2 seconds on our developer machines. This approach is architecturally very close to what we do with LinuxKit and Hyper-V today, with the additional benefit that it is more lightweight and more tightly integrated with Windows than Docker can provide alone. Microsoft has just announced WSL 2 with a major architecture change: instead of using emulation, they are actually providing a real Linux Kernel running inside a lightweight VM. Instead, Docker Desktop developed an alternative solution using Hyper-V VMs and LinuxKit to achieve the seamless integration our users expect and love today. The original WSL was an impressive effort to emulate a Linux Kernel on top of Windows, but there are such foundational differences between Windows and Linux that some things were impossible to implement with the same behavior as on native Linux, and this meant that it was impossible to run the Docker Engine and Kubernetes directly inside WSL. As part of this work, we have been closely monitoring Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) since it was introduced in 2016, to see how we could leverage it for our products. We spend a lot of time working with the software stacks provided by Microsoft and Apple to achieve this. One of Docker’s goals has always been to provide the best experience working with containers from a Desktop environment, with an experience as close to native as possible whether you are working on Windows, Mac or Linux.