Hi! I am having critical issues with running Ardour on WSL.
Why I am using WSL
I am a frequent Ardour user (and lover), always had used Linux, Fedora to be exact, but after recently I switched to a new laptop and didn’t notice the Laptop’s SoC’s Device Tree (ARM64) hadn’t yet been made publically available, meaning I couldn’t install Linux on it. So I was stuck with Windows, which I personally hate with passion.
Since I can’t, and hadn’t ever been able to purchase Ardour (see bottom), and building from source on windows is a nightmare, I was stuck with using WSL.
Issue:
I tried installing Ardour through a Fedora43 WSL (version 2).
While it does work; I am having major issues with GTK2’s modal windows: they can’t get properly focused.
Clicking on them only moves them up the Z-layer (so they appear on top) but they don’t actually get input; and clicking on any UI element makes the click “goes through” the window, and only targets the main, non-modal window behind it (if any).
Practically; it’s as if the window wasn’t there at all.
This makes using ardour impossible; as almost any main task in Ardour involves secondary (which apparently always means modal) windows. For example even just adding a track without opening a modal window that I can’t use.
The research I’ve made has told me that this has to do with WSL’s built-in X11 server, that apparently has been slightly modified to function on Windows; making it incompatible with GTK2 (stupid microsoft).
I have tried using alternative X servers for WSL, but thay didn’t solve the issue.
What could I do? Do you know any solutions for this annoyng WSL issue?
Notes:
The only possible solution I have found is building ardour for Windows from source; though that is expecially hard on Windows, and even more with ARM as MinGW doesn’t support ARM yet, so I’m sutck with the limited MSYS2 clang-ARM64 support (which, guess what, doesn’t support Xorg at all).
Also, I would enjoy actually donating to the Ardour community and also get a pre-built binary for Windows, but I can’t possibly use PayPal as I have lost access to my PayPal account in an unreversible way (that’s a totally different and VERY long story. But unfourtunatly, even though it will sound like an excuse, I genunely can’t recover my PayPal account nor create a new one (n)and/(n)or delete the old one). I have been trying to fix that for more than 15 years now, but nothing to do. I honestly can’t fix that right now.
