Windows 11’s release has come with little fanfare. In comparison to the release of Windows 10, this newest release of Windows has given few reasons to upgrade. In fact one of the biggest complaints is that Microsoft’s minimum requirements have even left some computers with great processors out of the upgrade.
My Lenovo 7th Generation Intel i7 laptop was one of these, however I did bypass the unsupported warnings and in fact did get the latest security updates. After playing with Windows 11 for a few weeks, my favorite feature is in fact…. Linux.
Windows Subsystem for Linux was introduced in 2016 as an obvious admission of defeat by Microsoft in the enterprise server and development world. However, it was always very limited, only able to run programs in the terminal. I was happy to see in Windows 11, there is now full support for most GUI (Graphical User Interface) GNU Linux applications.
In addition, Microsoft has made the installation of WSL very simple! It used to be a drawn out process that could take away an evening. Now you only have to follow this short direction:
You can now install everything you need to run Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) by entering this command in PowerShell or Windows Command Prompt and then restarting your machine.
wsl --install
This command will enable the required optional components, download the latest Linux kernel, set WSL 2 as your default, and install a Linux distribution for you (Ubuntu by default)
The first time you launch a newly installed Linux distribution, a console window will open and you'll be asked to wait for files to de-compress and be stored on your machine. All future launches should take less than a second.
(Quoted Text from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install)Microsoft has come a long way since declaring the entire Open Source community a cancer on software development. And though we will never let that quote die, welcome to the world of software that embraces Freedom and Privacy!
After installing WSL unto your Windows 11 system, you can then install Linux apps using the normal Ubuntu/Debian apt-get commands.
sudo apt-get install <app name>
