Windows 11 runs Graphical Linux Apps out of the box with WSLg

hey friends i'm scott let's take a developer's look at windows 11 specifically wsl and the windows terminal along with wslg the ability to go and run graphical apps built in on windows 11. i'm just going to flip my camera around so that when i point i'll be pointing up here at the the screen i'm in windows terminal windows terminal comes with windows 11 and when you run it it will automatically detect most of your prompts like windows powershell and the original dos command prompt here i have powershell core now called powershell 7. it also detected a bunch of the linuxes that i have installed i'll talk to you about how i did that as well you can also put on custom linuxes like cygwin or git bash by just editing those settings this is all done very easily you can just go and say settings you can have these different profiles over here or you can edit the json file directly so you have a lot of control over uh your terminal right now i've got it a little bit see-through a little bit transparent here i can make it more transparent more glassy or less transparent i'm holding down ctrl shift and i'm scrolling and then i've also added this powershell logo over here you might ask yourself why that's because when i go into other prompts i want to have a graphic there so i can tell the difference and then sometimes i like to go and say open this chevron i'm going to hold down alt with my thumb and then click and then i've got split screens then i've got my logo here and then my logo over there then i can hit ctrl w to close that tab all of these things being set in the settings i can do it either graphically in the settings ui or i can go and bind things myself so you can see here i've bound close pane to control w things like that so you have a lot of control if you don't like the ui well you can get rid of the ui you can actually just go like this i just hit alt enter and now i'm in a full screen terminal and again i can hit ctrl shift scroll and make that all go away so a lot of control here again built in and included now if you want to you can type wsl dash dash install i'll do another video about my prompt later you'll notice that i've got a lot of customizations i've also updated my prompt with oh my posh to include the current directory the current get a branch whether or not i've got one or uh added file or one modified file as well as the current version of net that i'm running in the visual studio visual studio icon and then a human heart that tells me the current error level because if i type something silly i want the heart to turn red that's not the point of this video what we're going to do instead is i'm going to type wsl-install i've also got a bit of a history picker here as well that's nice we'll do a whole prompt video at some point type in wsl-dash install and if you don't have the windows subsystem for linux installed it will go and pop up and say cool i will get you a linux it will go and install ubuntu it'll set all the settings reboot your machine and you'll come back into the windows terminal and you will have a linux ubuntu instance automatically set up you'll notice that i did that and i already got these installed now if i want i could say wsl dash dash install and we'll say debian okay now it's going to go and actually get that for me it's downloading debian right now installing it and it's easy to install because it's just a tar file and look setting it up you put in a uh unix username and a password hope i typed it right twice i don't feel like i did yeah i'm going to try again darn it what is my password typing it too fast sweet okay cool there's debian now when i close my terminal and then run it again pull this down auto detected our new linux now i can have multiple linuxes installed so i can type wsl dash dash list dash v for verbose and you can see that i have my default one that is ubuntu i'm on 1804 but i've also got 2004 installed and then the debian that we just installed moments ago so i can have n number of these where n is any number i can click here and i can open up ubuntu and i've got my nice logo here and i've also set up a color um a color scheme that i like called ubuntu legit that i've got a gist up on my github if you want and then i can also go and again holding down alt and clicking on ubuntu i can have split screen i can run h-top to prove it now i'm going to come back over to the left i'm going to hit ctrl w here's h top i'll hit q to quit and you'll notice that i've also modified my prompt here in ubuntu to look the same but i can prove to you that it is really ubuntu by saying lsb release dash a and you can see this is in fact a real version of ubuntu and it's running right now on my windows machine it is using a tiny tiny utility virtual machine but you'll notice that these linuxes start very very fast oops that's a cloud shell start very fast let's go and just start a bunch there we go so i've just started five linuxes they're all different something went wrong thank you alexa go away don't want to talk to you right now close it close it close it close it boom there you go isn't that cool now here's where things get interesting let's go and grab some linux application let's look at this list of awesome linux applications we've got game opportunities open source gaming platform we've got different clients let's try a git client get i what's this now when windows people typically go and find something that's for linux they go and they search the web they find a linux thing oh shoot this only works on linux that's a that's that's a bummer uh i can't use that on windows well you can you can now all right let's figure out how to get this thing so it looks like giggle is a thing how do i get it i'm going google for giggle giggle install ubuntu there we go let's try that i'm just going to paste that in directly and you'll notice that linux goes and set it up now hit the start menu here and i want to point this out look what happened right here let's just pause for a second and drink this in windows 11 notice that we installed this linux gui app and added a link to it for us here in the start menu so now i can go and run this app and here it is look at this now notice notice the window is not a windows looking window is it that is painted by linux what we've done here is we've done all the work in linux it's a real linux environment we're handling all of that work automatically and then we're remote desktopping into a seamless version of this seamless version of this you can actually see how the corners are nice and we can go and open up you know an existing repository on the file system let's go ahead and go into home scott let's grab my you know my website and we'll say okay look at this i am on windows 11 and i'm looking at the get repository for my own website in a tool written for linux and it just works that's actually c sharp right there let's try another let's try another one let's try something else what else do we got to choose from here ah the let's do that let's go and actually kick click on all apps and then we'll click on ubuntu and then we'll see here that we've oops i actually clicked on ubuntu rather than the group i picked on ubuntu itself i'm actually going to go and say you and i'm going to open this one up that's what i wanted to do for you and we see here we've got emacs media player let's click on the gnu image manipulation program or the look at that so here we've got the terminal here we've got the i'm going to point out how fast that started and i can go and open an image works just fine that's slick now i'm in a linux windows linux application on windows you notice that it's wicked fast but i can also click on file system and go to mnt and click on the mount point and we actually have mount points here to our windows file system so we can go back and forth so my linux applications can access my windows file system and back and forth and here we've got emacs and we've got giggle but then i could go and start up for example you know visual studio code which is a windows application now i've got these apps all running side by side and then if i wanted to all right check this out we could come out to linux we'll go into my hanselman folder we're on the linux file system here and i'm going to type code dot in linux it's installing the vs code server for x64 and it's going to actually unpack that locally launch the windows version of visual studio all right install the packages that i need for linux and you'll notice here in the corner visual studio code knows that we're talking to ubuntu even though we are now running the windows version of this i've got full intellisense i can run it and if i want to check this out inside of visual studio code i can click on terminal lsb release dash a i'm in visual studio code on windows 11 and then i can run my linux terminal here you get the best of both worlds you might say why why not just run linux i like running windows runs all my games i like the ui i like the file explorer i enjoy the terminal i have a lot of fun with it but and what this allows me to do is have the best of all worlds i can move seamlessly between all of these applications i can run my website dot net run we're going to go and start up on localhost localhost 5000 i can now hover over that notice how that's underlined i can actually click on that which fires up my website locally that cool it's a really really really interesting time right now to be a developer particularly in the windows space because you can do anything you want you can run docker you can run linux you get this wonderful terminal again i can go full screen we also have the ability to do of course virtual desktops which is great all of these things work seamlessly and if you want to read more about wslg go and search for w w s l g architecture and there's a great article here by steve who is on the team and he talks about the philosophy of it how weyland and weston and rdp rail works but what you want to look at specifically is this this is this great diagram that explains the relationship between your applications that run within your user distribution your debian your ubuntu whatever and the separate windows maintain distro that handles everything here's the crazy part okay even sound works think about that sound on linux works on windows let's see that work that'll be our that'll be our finale don't you think sound works let's go and jump to our home directory we'll run mpv which is a movie player on linux and we'll go and run it on a video for you look at that sound works on windows on linux scandalous what a lovely thing that is and i ran it from the command line last thing i want to point out if i go and start up the explorer the windows explorer we can actually go to down here linux appears in the windows explorer in the windows explorer if i click on that it will actually show the files so i can access all of my files directly from windows explorer and that video that i just played is sitting right there so again moving seamlessly between windows and linux it works great i would encourage you to check it out go get windows 11 type wsl dash dash install go install visual studio code you're going to have a blast and i'll again i'll go and do a how to set up your terminal video soon as well thanks y'all

Channel: Scott Hanselman

Views: 341,565

Keywords:

Id: b1YBx1L8op4

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/frezik]

Will SSH forwarding on X11 still work? I'm guessing yes, since it seems to run an X server.

[u/ahdzuhadh]

Finally the year of the Linux Desktop.

[u/sephirothbahamut]

Anyone knows what he's using to draw quick arrows-rectangles while screen recording?

[u/Gubru]

Now install WINE on it.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm a Linux fan boy but I must say that's neat.

[u/ThatInternetGuy]

WSL2 is a life saver for devs using Windows. We get to enjoy the best of both worlds, with a small performance sacrifice. I must say that you need to double up your RAM.

[u/elteide]

What's the improvement over win10 wsl2 ? I don't see anything new on this vid

[u/drysart]

Launching Windows' VS Code from Linux and having it run on Linux files with the integrated terminal being Linux too is what really sold it for me. This is the first thing I've seen that's made me want to upgrade to Windows 11.

[u/UsuallyMooACow]

As a hardcore mac user for the last 10-13 years, I changed to windows as an experiment last year. I spent $650 on parts and had a really powerful box compared to the Mac I had been on. I don't ever work somewhere other than my work station so having a desktop was fine. 32 gigs of ram. I love it.

Anyway, I figured I could switch to windows because I use docker for all my development. It went SOOOO well. I actually find I like Windows better than OSX at this point. Lots of things I like about Windows like the preview of windows on the task bar and stuff.

Been doing it for a year or so and no regrets.