It would allow me to function normally on a windows box. I can apt-get install everything I need except anything that depends on X.
I'd still rather run GNU/Linux from the metal up, but my work depends on Windows for legacy data-acquisition systems. Right now, I have an experiment that's running a linux box and windows box side by side in order to get the best of both. Working out hardware access in a VM sounds unpleasant, so I'd love to see the native-windows-GNU implementation extended to X.
For the five or six years my daily driver has run windows (gaming) while actual work gets done by forwarding X from a headless linux box. In my experience:
* MobaXTerm was usable (on Win7-8, a couple years ago), but IIRC it's surrounded by a faint stench of upsell and I recall being annoyed by its attempt to be a full desktop environment (tabs, file manager, integrated editor, etc). It feels very... windows-y, the X server equivalent of PuTTY.
* VcXsrv had (on Win10, about two weeks ago) a show-stopper bug - windows would fail to redraw outside their original bounds when resized. It also had trouble using modern UI toolkits or themes.
* Cygwin/X is the best, no issues at all if you're in cygwin, but I was unable to get it to cooperate smoothly with bash on windows and ended up deciding that the environment was worth more than the tiny missing features. If you don't need WSL I'd recommend this.
* Xming is what I've settled on. I use the free version, which is a major version behind (6.9 instead of 7.7), but I haven't noticed it lacking anything compared to Cygwin/X. Seems to be just as reliable as Cygwin/X too. Getting it configured was somewhat annoying (had to create xauthority manually, etc), but now that it's set up it's working smoothly.
I am mostly annoyed by two things, both of which are common to the setup and not the chosen tools:
* I have to put up with Windows for window management. I would much prefer something like i3, but I haven't gotten the fullscreen mode to work to my satisfaction.
* Network issues. You must be wired and you must have spare bandwidth. If you're running gigabit ethernet this isn't really an issue, but if you try to do it over wifi you're going to have a bad time.
Compared to running a virtual machine... it really comes down to picking a set of annoyances. VM you have to deal with configurating another machine, it devours resources, integration with the host isn't as good, and it can't tolerate monitor switching at all. Native X you don't get a usable WM. shrug
An issue I've had with Xming and Cygwin, is if I rdp to my windows desktop from my laptop (potentially caused by using a different screen resolution / color depth), sometimes the X server will crash when I go back to my full desktop.
Is it the look and feel (I mean which gestures do a thing, location of widgets, etc.) that's the blocker, or is it the availability of certain X applications that you're used to?
There are several implementations of X for win32/64 (there's a good one in Cygwin)-- I'm looking for something integrated with Microsoft's bare-metal implementation of Ubuntu.
TL;DR: I want to 'apt-get install lyx octave gnuplot chromium darktable' with full functionality.
I'd still rather run GNU/Linux from the metal up, but my work depends on Windows for legacy data-acquisition systems. Right now, I have an experiment that's running a linux box and windows box side by side in order to get the best of both. Working out hardware access in a VM sounds unpleasant, so I'd love to see the native-windows-GNU implementation extended to X.