Windows Subsystem for Linux now officially supports Linux GUI apps

At last year’s Build conference, Microsoft promised to add support for Linux GUI apps to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Well, today at the Build 2021 conference, the Redmond giant finally made that dream a reality. Support for GUI-based Linux apps on Windows 10 is now officially available to all developers. It was first released in preview early last month.

“We’ve added support for Linux GUI apps to WSL, so you can run your favorite Linux editors, tools, utilities, and applications [on Windows 10]. This greatly improves your debugging and execution capabilities,” Microsoft said in an official blog post .

If you want to test how well Linux apps work on your Windows PC, we already have a detailed guide on how to run Linux GUI apps on your Windows 10 PC with GUI support enabled. See the linked article to use Linux apps without setting up an X server each time.

Additionally, Microsoft is now enabling developers to run “Linux AI and machine learning scenarios directly within WSL.” This means data scientists can now use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on Windows 10 PCs to track AI and ML models.

According to the official blog post , “WSL supports all major CUDA-based tools for ML acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs, including frameworks that implement CUDA backends such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.” Well, the Redmond giant kicked off its Build 2021 conference by revealing two surprising features coming to Windows Subsystem for Linux.