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

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?

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!

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

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