If you want to dig further into the hairy details of WSLg's architecture, we highly recommend Microsoft's own April 19 devblog post on exactly that topic. To make it all work, this meant building the graphical interface on the Weston reference compositor for Wayland, hitched to XWayland to support X clients, with FreeRDP providing connectivity between the native Windows system and the X/Wayland apps running under WSLg. If you're looking for how WSLg works, we can get you started there also: Microsoft decided to go future-forward and build using the Wayland protocol rather than the increasingly elderly X11/xorg. Heading to YouTube in it worked perfectly, too, with neither frame drops in the video nor glitches in the audio. When I installed WSLg on Windows 11 on the Framework laptop, running firefox from the Ubuntu terminal popped up the iconic browser automatically. If this is your first time hearing of WSLg, the short version is simple: you can install GUI apps-for example, Firefox-from your Ubuntu (or other distro) command line, and they'll work as expected, including sound.

But Windows 11 is the first production Windows build with WSLg support. This isn't exactly a first-Microsoft debuted WSLg in April, with Windows 10 Insider Build 21364.

Installing WSL on Windows 11įurther Reading Graphical Linux apps are coming to Windows Subsystem for LinuxIn addition to easy installation, WSL on Windows 11 brings support for both graphics and audio in WSL apps. The Windows Subsystem for Linux isn't perfect on Windows 11, but it's a huge improvement over what came before. Windows 11 finally fixes both of those problems. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be-and getting graphical apps to work has historically been possible but also a pain in the butt that required some fairly obscure third-party software. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Further Reading Windows 11: The Ars Technica reviewIn our main Windows 11 review posted earlier this week, we covered the majority of new features and design decisions in Microsoft's newest consumer OS-and it feels reasonable to characterize the overall impression given there as 'lukewarm.' The good news is that we still hadn't covered the best part of Windows 11: Linux.įor years now, Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world.

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