ornstein89 / wsl-ubuntu-desktop

Starts graphical desktop on WSL Ubuntu and shows it on Windows 10 host by VNC or X Window

Update 2023

With latest November 2022 update (see Run Linux GUI apps on the Windows Subsystem for Linux) WSL can start GUI apps natively, and you don't need any external VNC or X11 clients anymore. This makes the repository outdated. Just run

wsl --update
wsl --shutdown

then restart WSL, install and run any GUI app (Geany, for example)

WSL-Ubuntu-Desktop (deprecated)

Starts graphical desktop on WSL Ubuntu (on Windows 10) and setup VNC or, alternatively, X Window remote session.

Based on following tutorials:

• How to Install VNC on Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04 (Windows, Linux and Mac),
• VNCserver setup on Ubuntu.

Currently uses lightweight XFCE4 desktop. Requires at least 800Mb of free space on host machine.

To start X Window remote session:

• Install X Window client on Windows 10 host, like VcXsrv or some other.
• Setup display number parameter equal to 1 in X Windows client.
• Start X Windows client session on host Win10.
• Clone this repo to ~/ within WSL.
• Launch ./XFCE4_through_XWin.sh from repository folder in WSL terminal. First time it takes 1-2 minutes to install xfce4.

To start VNC session:

• Install some VNC viewer on Windows 10 host, like RealVNC VNC Viewer or some other.
• Clone this repo to ~/ within WSL.
• Launch ./XFCE4_through_VNC.sh from repository folder in WSL terminal.
• Try to connetc with VNC Viewer on host Win10 to VNC stream at localhost:5901 or 127.0.0.1:5901.