WSL2

Mi­crosoft 💔 Linux

In 2001, Mi­crosoft's former CEO— Steve Ballmer— was quoted by the on­line tech news pub­li­ca­tion, The Reg­ister, saying:

Linux is a cancer that at­taches it­self in an in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty sense to every­thing it touches

Fast-for­ward 15 years into the fu­ture— at Mi­crosoft's de­vel­oper con­fer­ence, Build 2016— and Gates' tech be­he­moth re­veals a sudden volte-face. The cur­rent CEO, Satya Nadella, an­nounces Win­dows Sub­system for Linux. With WSL, Mi­crosoft is taking some of the most pop­ular Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions and making them avail­able within Win­dows through the Mi­crosoft Store.

Ac­cording to a W³Techs survey , Unix op­er­ating sys­tems (the under-pin­ning OS of Linux, as well as MacOS) make up 71% of the Web, the re­maining 29% being Win­dows. Ad­di­tion­ally, every An­droid phone, tablet and smart TV runs on a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the Linux kernel. So, I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?

Whether or not its be­cause of Mi­crosoft's good graces or some ul­te­rior mo­tive, I know having an easily ac­ces­sible Unix-type en­vi­ron­ment avail­able on Win­dows has been a god­send for me and for so many other de­vel­opers.

What's so great about WSL?

Be­fore WSL, de­vel­opers run­ning Win­dows had two op­tions:

1. A vir­tual ma­chine (VM)
2. Dual-booted op­er­ating sys­tems

Run­ning a vir­tual ma­chine uses up more re­sources than WSL. It can also be dif­fi­cult to in­te­grate hard­ware and files be­tween the host ma­chine and the VM. Dual-booting al­lows for a full-fledged in­stall on a sep­a­rate disk par­ti­tion; but it re­quires a restart any time you want to switch be­tween OS's.

Win­dows Sub­system on Linux doesn't in­te­grate with the host's hard­ware per­fectly— for ex­ample, NVIDIA is still working on CUDA dri­vers that will take ad­van­tage of GPU re­sources from within WSL. How­ever, for Linux de­vel­opers who are fre­quently run­ning CAD soft­ware or Adobe Suite (which are dif­fi­cult-to-im­pos­sible to in­stall on Linux), WSL can be a fan­tastic partner.

WSL1 vs WSL2

More re­cently, Mi­crosoft an­nounced WSL2— an up­date that al­lows for a more com­plete Linux kernel to run on a Win­dows ma­chine. This made it much easier to in­stall a va­riety of soft­ware that had been dif­fi­cult to run on the pre­vious, WSL1. WSL2 is very sim­ilar to run­ning a vir­tual ma­chine (in fact it uses Mi­crosoft's hy­perV vir­tual ma­chines).

How­ever, using WSL2 (as op­posed to in­stalling a Linux distro through Vir­tu­alBox, or an­other VM man­ager) pro­vides some minor per­for­mance ben­e­fits since Mi­crosoft has op­ti­mized it to in­te­grate with Win­dows' ser­vices. If you want, I rec­om­mend reading Mi­crosoft's own WSL1-vs-WSL2 fea­ture com­par­ison docs.

Al­right, so how do I in­stall WSL2?

Mi­crosoft has clean, straight-for­ward in­stal­la­tion doc­u­men­ta­tion for WSL and WSL2. You can refer to that tu­to­rial if you get stuck, or just follow the steps out­lined below. Be­fore starting, make sure you up­date your Win­dows 10 in­stal­la­tion with the most re­cent build.

I'll also be going one-step fur­ther, and showing you how to run a Linux GUI using WSL2 and VcXsrv (dis­play for­warding). If you're more of a vi­sual-learner, I've also in­cluded an in­stal­la­tion speedrun video that fol­lows the same steps out­lined below (edit: I forgot step 11 in the video, and it's a crit­ical one! Make sure you do that!).

1. En­able WSL Fea­ture

First you need to en­able the Win­dows Sub­system on Linux fea­ture by right-clicking on Pow­er­shell from the start menu and clicking "Run as Ad­min­is­trator".

Then, paste the fol­lowing com­mand and hit "Enter"— don't close the Pow­er­shell!

2. En­able WSL2 Vir­tual Ma­chine Fea­ture

After the last com­mand is fin­ished, paste the fol­lowing com­mand in the same Ad­min­is­trator-level shell, and hit "Enter" to en­able the WSL2 VM. Again, keep this shell open.

3. Down­load and In­stall the WSL2 Linux Kernel Up­date

Click here to down­load the Mi­crosoft ex­e­cutable for in­stalling the WSL2 Linux Kernel up­date. Once it's fin­ished down­loading, double-click the ex­e­cutable and follow the in­stal­la­tion steps. This part's pretty straight­for­ward

4. Set WSL2 as De­fault Ver­sion

Copy and paste the fol­lowing com­mand in Pow­er­shell to set WSL2 to be the de­fault ver­sion:

5. In­stall Ubuntu 20.04 from the Mi­crosoft Store

Click the start menu and open the Mi­crosoft Store. Search for "Ubuntu 20.04" and in­stall this Linux distro. If you want to use an­other distro, that's fine; but Ubuntu 20.04 is com­pat­ible with the Re­golith Linux desktop GUI we'll be in­stalling in just a bit.

6. Ubuntu 20.04 Ini­tial Setup

Once Ubuntu is done in­stalling, click "Launch" to ini­tiate first-time in­stal­la­tion setup. You'll be prompted to put in a user­name and pass­word.

7. Make sure You're Using WSL2

At this point, it might be a good idea to double-check that WSL is using ver­sion 2 by de­fault. Open a com­mand prompt (or use Pow­er­shell if it's still open) to paste in the fol­lowing com­mand:

8. Down­load and In­stall VcXsrv

VcXsrv is an X Server that we'll use to view the GUI from WSL2.

There are a few other dis­play-for­warding servers avail­able (like Xming ), but I've found VcXsrv works the best. Down­load the ex­e­cutable here and click through the in­stal­la­tion steps.

9. In­stall Re­golith Desktop

I have Re­golith Desktop in­stalled on one of my PCs, and it's fan­tastic. It's pre­con­fig­ured to use the i3 window man­ager which I find in­cred­ibly ef­fi­cient for its tiling and hotkey fea­tures.

A loosed reader, Ro­drigo, asked specif­i­cally for a Re­golith tu­to­rial; but if you want to in­stall a dif­ferent GUI I'm sure its pos­sible! To in­stall Re­golith Desktop, open your fresh Ubuntu in­stall, and paste in the fol­lowing lines:

It's a lot of pack­ages, so it'll take some time.

10. Change the "Mod" Key

Re­golith, or rather i3-wm, uses the Super (Win­dows) key as the hotkey prefix by de­fault. Since you're run­ning this GUI within Win­dows, you'll run into a lot of overlap be­tween Win­dows' and i3-wm's pre­con­fig­ured short­cuts.

For this reason, I rec­om­mend swap­ping the Super key for the Alt key. To change the Mod key map­ping use the Vim or Nano text ed­i­tors to open the con­fig­u­ra­tion file lo­cated at:

On lines 42 and 43, you should find the Mod key as­sign­ment. Switch "Mod1" and "Mod4" and you'll be good to go! Your edited lines should look like this:

If you're using Vim, hit "Es­cape" and type ":wq", then hit "Enter" to write and quit the file. You can check out the of­fi­cial Re­golith tu­to­rial on making these changes if you get stuck.

11. Ex­port DIS­PLAY pa­ra­meter

An­other crit­ical edit (that I forgot to put in the video— oops 🙃) is to ex­port the DIS­PLAY vari­able. Since WSL2 is a VM, it has it's own IP ad­dress (which can change at each startup). As a re­sult, you'll need to add a couple lines to your bash pro­file for VcXsrv to con­nect to WSL2.

To open your ".bashrc" with Vim:

Press and hold Shift then press "G" to jump to the bottom of the file. On two new lines, paste in the fol­lowing code:

12. Open and Con­figure VcXsrv

Click the start menu and type in "Xlaunch" then hit "Enter" to run VcXsrv. Click the "One window without ti­tlebar" op­tion (you can ex­plore the others later, if you want) and click next. Leave it on "Start no client" and click next. Then, in the "Ad­di­tional pa­ra­me­ters" input, add "-ac" and click next. I rec­om­mend clicking "Save con­fig­u­ra­tion" for ease of use.

At this point, you should have a black screen waiting to ac­cept a dis­play input.

13. Run Re­golith Desktop

The last thing to do is run the magic line:

You should then see a graph­ical Re­golith Desktop ap­pear in the VcXsrv window! Huzzah! Feel free to play around with your new graph­ical WSL2 setup. To see an overview of the avail­able short­cuts, use "Alt+Shift+?" to bring up the help menu. You can find more help in Re­golith's of­fi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Wrap­ping Up

Hope­fully you fin­ished this tu­to­rial with a working Re­golith Desktop GUI run­ning off WSL2. If you run into any issue, or have ques­tions, feel free to leave a com­ment. If you'd like to know how to for­ward audio from WSL2 (a fea­ture not yet avail­able by de­fault), let me know and I'll put to­gether an­other tu­to­rial.

Until next time, happy coding!