Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11

Now that Windows 11 has been released I decided to switch from my Windows 11 insiders build and go over to my Windows 10 partition, reset it and start over on a fresh Windows 11 machine!

In the past getting set up with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has had it’s challenges but now with Windows 11 it’s as simple as installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux app from the Windows Store.

GUIs

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for use in WSL now work with no configuration, install your browser of choice via the command line then you can pick it from the Windows Start menu like any other app installed on your machine.

This used to be a whole load of dependencies that needed to be installed and some configuration of the display. I go into detail in Enable GUIs on Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) if you’re interested. This is all unnecessary now with Windows 11 however!

If you want to install Chrome on Ubuntu however there’s still the same manual install needed for that. See my post on Use Chrome in Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem Linux for more info on how to do that.

Third party apps with winget

For third part apps in the past I have used Chocolatey as it had all the apps I needed, now with Windows 11 all the apps I need are there including some I couldn’t get via Chocolatey!

So now rather than going through the setup of Chocolatey, (which can be a bit daunting at times) all I need to do now is open a PowerShell terminal and search for what I want to install!

I’ve created a GitHub gist of all the programs I install.

Linux distributions not on the Windows Store

There’s still the aspect of using a Linux distribution that’s not on the Windows Store, you can do this and I have detailed the whole setup for web dev in WSL Web Developer Bootstrap with Fedora 33 (replace Fedora 33 with your distro of choice).

Windows Subsystem for Linux Preview

You can now install WSL from the Windows store with the Windows Subsystem for Linux Preview app!

Just make sure you have Virtual Machine Platform enabled in the ‘Turn Windows Features on or off’ section.

Conclusion

What was once several blog posts on how to configure your system to first get set up to use WSL is now a simple Windows Store app and a couple of PowerShell commands!