RUN GRAPHICAL LINUX APPLICATIONS IN WINDOWS

Why limit yourself to one software library? Nik Rawlinson finds out how to run Linux software natively on Windows

Windows is by far the most popular operating system in the world - but for developers and power users, it's often helpful to be able to switch into a Linux environment. In the past, this meant dual-booting, or installing your chosen distribution in a virtual machine. But since 2016 there's been a better way: the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is an optional OS component that provides a fully working, officially supported Linux environment right inside Windows.

The major limitation of WSL, when it was first introduced, was that it was a text-only interface. You could run scripts and command-line programs, but graphical applications were off the menu.

That's no longer the case. All desktop editions of Windows 10 and 11 now support WSLg - an updated version of WSL, where the "g" stands for GUI. It enables you to run graphical Linux applications directly on the Windows desktop, with minimal configuration. It's a huge boon for anyone who works across multiple platforms, or who just wants to try out applications and tools that aren't available for Windows.

WSLg isn't installed by default, but it's not hard to set up. Here's our guide to installing it and running your first Linux app on Windows. We're using Windows 11, but the same instructions will work for Windows 10; in either case, just make sure you're using the latest version of the OS, so that all the relevant modules are installed.

Installing WSL and setting up your Linux account

You can install WSL from the Microsoft Store (pcpro.link/346wsl), but most of the setup process is carried out at the command line, so we may as well start there. We'll use a PowerShell session with administrator privileges - an easy way to open one is right-click the Start menu and select "Windows Terminal (Admin)", then click Yes to allow changes to your system.