Is this, like, incredibly novel, common, or somewhere in between? I’ve never heard of this apart from WLS…
From the documentation site you linked, Q4OS doesn’t run inside Windows. The Q4OS installer runs inside Windows, and it stores the root filesystem for Q4OS as a file inside an existing Windows drive partition. I’m not personally aware of other Linux OS’s that do either of these things, nor do I particularly desire a Linux OS that does either of these things. I can see it being useful if you want to keep your Windows installation fully intact. I imagine disk I/O performance takes a small hit.
Ubuntu used to have an option for that and the screen shot from the site looks quite a bit like the old Ubuntu installer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they forked that installer from Ubuntu at some point.
Ubuntu used to have an option for that and the screen shot from the site looks quite a bit like the old Ubuntu installer.
Oh, right you are. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wubi
It even has a wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)
Can Q4OS installed that way access files from the Windows partition?
I have no idea, though I would lean “probably not” if I had to guess.



