At the end of 2016, Microsoft, in an unexpected move, announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation. The new-age collaboration was to bring a part of Linux on Windows 10 to make it a developer-friendly platform. Fast forward to 2021, and it seems the partnership has paid off as the project has received major improvements. Now, Microsoft has announced that you can run GUI-based Linux programs on Windows 10 natively with hardware acceleration support. We tried a few popular Linux apps, and they worked flawlessly on our Windows laptop. So, if you want to learn how to install and use Linux applications on Windows 10 in a graphical user interface, follow our guide step by step.
Here, we are going to show you how to install Linux programs on Windows 10 using the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) feature. If you are out of the loop, WSL is an actual Linux kernel that is installed on Windows 10. It’s not a compatibility layer (like Wine) or a virtual machine on Windows 10 so the performance remains top-notch.
- Now, you can install whichever program you want right from VLC, Audacity, Skype to Gedit, and more. In a traditional Linux fashion, you will have to use the sudo apt install command. For your perusal, a GitHub user has created a list of Linux programs that run quite well on Windows 10, so check that out for more information. Here, for instance, I am installing Gedit, the text editor of Linux, through the Terminal.
