HP To Begin Pre-Loading WSL2 For Windows On Upcoming HP Workstations

HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed.

While HP has been offering Linux pre-loaded on select workstation products, their latest endeavor is shipping WSL2 pre-installed by default on Microsoft Windows for some upcoming workstations.

HP hopes that having WSL2 pre-installed will make their Z by HP workstations more attractive to data scientists and machine learning developers. Granted, installing WSL2 in the first place isn't that challenging at all... Most data scientists and software engineers working on ML/AI should be more than capable to do so or to be able to install their own Linux distribution of choice on the hardware. In any case, it's nice seeing WSL2 included by default as something useful to users in this area compared to much of the software pre-load crap from OEMs on Windows PCs.

Microsoft collaborated with HP on offering the WSL2 pre-installed environment, including support for NVIDIA GPU acceleration within WSL2 on the Z workstations with compute offloading or running of graphical applications.

More details on today's announcement via the HP press release.