The Ubuntu apps for the Windows Subsystem for Linux provide the very same packages you can find on Ubuntu servers, desktops, cloud instances and containers, and this ensures maximal compatibility with other Ubuntu installations. Until recently there was little work done to integrate Ubuntu with the Windows system running the WSL environment, but now this is changing.

In Ubuntu metapackages collect packages useful for a common purpose by depending on them and ubuntu-wsl is the new metapackage to collect integration packages to be installed on every Ubuntu WSL system. It pulls in wslu, “A collection of utilities for WSL” to let you create shortcuts on the Windows desktop with wslusc , start the default Windows browser with wslview , and do a few other things:

With updates to the ubuntu-wsl metapackage we will add new features to Ubuntu WSL installations to make them even more comfortable to use, thus if you have an older installation please install the package manually:

sudo apt update sudo apt install ubuntu-wsl

Oh, and one more thing, you can even set up sound and run graphical apps if you make a few manual steps. For details check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL!