Windows is by far the world’s most popular operating system, but you can make it even more useful by running Linux inside it. In the past, this meant dual-booting your PC so it ran both Windows and Linux, or installing Linux in a virtual machine.
However, since 2016 there’s been a better way: the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) provides a fully working, officially supported Linux system from within Windows.
The major limitation of WSL when first introduced was that it was a text-only interface. You could run scripts and command-line programs, but not graphical software. 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 (graphical user interface).
It lets you run graphical Linux programs directly on the Windows desktop. It’s ideal for anyone who likes to work across multiple operating systems or who wants to try tools that aren’t available for Windows. WSLg isn’t installed by default, but it’s
