Why is Windows 11 good for development?

Development has evolved a lot in the past years and a lot have become more multi-platform. Today you can easily create a program that can run on any platform. With Windows 11 it has become much easier to develop and test it across platforms.

Windows 10 introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which allows you to run Linux command line inside Windows and this was the start of everything.

Microsoft improved this system over time and eventually the compatibility got high enough that they could support Docker containers running directly into this subsystem. Now you can run Docker in Windows without the need of a virtual box or Hyper-V.

Windows 11 is now introducing support for graphical apps, it means you can install programs inside Linux inside Windows and run it. For example you can run Gimp (on Linux) and edit images. You can run other programs too, like Chrome.

So what does it all mean?

It means that you’re able to and will be able to do all these things in Windows:

• test a website running on Chrome on Linux
• test a desktop app on Linux
• run a project from Terminator (terminal app for Linux)
• run shell scripts

Do you see what’s going on here? You can basically develop for both Windows and Linux without having to switch machines or using virtual boxes and things like that! If you prefer using Linux to develop you can just switch to Linux in a terminal and use all the bash scripts you want.

How do I install it?

As shown in the video the current command to install it is: wsl --install

It seems to be that simple!

Extra: Smart Window Snap

If you’re a PowerToys user you might’ve seen this. This is a system that gives you more options on how you want to snap your windows. This is going to be built-in for any applications and it’ll allow you to snap windows with a few different templates.

Watch Scott Hanselman talk about Windows 11 and demonstrate these features

First Look at Windows 11 Insiders Build with UI Tour June 2021 — YouTube