This is great.

I really hate Windows 11. It doesn’t run on several of my computers due to its system requirements and for those that it does run on I find the UX to be such a huge step backwards that I find myself continually fighting with the shell rather than actually getting work done. So, I’ve been steadfastly sticking to Windows 10 on machines where I need Windows.

There’s so many things completely artificially gated to Windows 11. The new Apple Music Preview which is gated to 11 can be easily patched to run on 10 just by editing the manifest. I’ve found many other “Windows 11 only” things to be entirely “paper” limitations. I tried to hack WSA onto 10 a while back but quickly realized it was more than a manifest change and lost interest because it wasn’t important enough to me to pursue further.

I’m glad someone took the time to figure it out and I tip my hat to the folks that took the time to debug and reverse engineer this solution. The relative simplicity of the resulting hack to run WSA on Windows 10 shows that it seems to be more of an unwillingness to backport some new APIs rather than any sort of deep technological changes in the OS.