Scott Hanselman

Can you really develop with Linux GUI Apps on Windows 10 with WSLg? How about PyCharm?

April 22, 2021 Comment on this post [3] Posted in Linux | Win10
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I blogged about How to run Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 with WSL and WSLg, but how "real" is this? Are these just toy apps? Nope.

I wanted to see if I could install the Community Edition of PyCharm on Ubuntu 20.04. Even though I can't use "snaps" yet on WSL (because of systemd support in progress) I can easily just get the tar file, untar it, and run it and it works.

I did a wget of the standalone, then tar xzf'ed into a folder and ran pycharm.sh and it literally just worked.

When debugging I did get an "unable to execute x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc" error but that's just because I hadn't setup build-essentials yet. Once I installed the right stuff I was all set.

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf libtool 

Cool looking, eh?

Linux PyCharm on Windows running under Ubuntu 20.04 with WSL and WSLg

I prefer to do most of my Linux dev using VSCode Remote but there's a TON of options here now that you can run Windows apps, Linux apps, or split-brain apps with half inside Linux and half in Windows. Amazing stuff!

VS Code Remote Architecture

You can learn about WSLg over in their GitHub, it's all open source.


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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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April 27, 2021 18:38
Scott, I have no idea if you helped push for 64 bit VS, but if you did, thanks! Would like to see you blog about it. I've never seen an MSDN blog post get so many comments before.
Sam
April 27, 2021 20:57
Eagerly expecting a Win32 thunk layer on top of WSLBSD soon from Microsoft
April 28, 2021 13:54
This might help with systemd on Ubuntu under WSL:

https://github.com/DamionGans/ubuntu-wsl2-systemd-script

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.