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
