You don’t need a VM to run Linux on Windows anymore !!

Read this article if

You have Windows 10. You setup VMs within Windows to execute Linux native commands. You ❤ Docker, Kubernetes and Minikube and you don’t have Hyper-V and don’t like the cumbersome setup process and is highly unreliable. You ❤ Power shell + Chocolatey but you simply can’t get over Bash !!. Your Linux VMs are really slow and consume a lot of resources

Do yourself a favor , enable Linux Subsystems for Windows.

Step 1: Open Powershell as an administrator and run this command

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
and Restart your system when prompted !!

Step 2: Check OS Build Version

systeminfo | Select-String "^OS Name","^OS Version"
if (build version >= Windows build 16215):
   Open Microsoft Store;
   Search for "Linux"
   Select Distro and Install
else:
   proceed to Step 3 :(

Step 3: Download Distros based on your requirement. I downloaded Ubuntu 18.04 Links Below

Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 18.04 ARM
Ubuntu 16.04
Debian GNU/Linux
Kali Linux
OpenSUSE
SLES

Step 4: Extract the Archive and Install it

1) Open Powershell
----------------
cd C:\
mkdir Distros
cd Distros
2) Copy file from Downloads folder to this folder
------------------------------------------------

3) Open Powershell
-------------------
Rename-Item ~/Ubuntu.appx ~/Ubuntu.zip 
Expand-Archive ~/Ubuntu.zip ~/Ubuntu
ls 
Run Ubuntu.exe and enter your username and password 

!!! Note: Sometimes you may have to rename and unzip the appx file inside the appx archive to see the actual .exe

Step 5: Once the installation is done

Open Powershell and add to path variable (or) do it manually
------------------------------------------------------------
$userenv = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "User") [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $userenv + "C:\Distros\Ubuntu", "User")

How do I exchange files between the Windows system and Linux Subsystem ?

!!! Don’t Modify them, instead work on a copy. Unless you want to get stuck in the rabbit-hole of file metadata corruption

Linux Files on Windows

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages

Windows Files on Linux

C:\ 
----------
/mnt/c/
D:\
----------
/mnt/d/

Yes you may run multiple Linux distros on the same machine :)