Set Up Python on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) (2024)

FAQs

Should I install Python on WSL or Windows? ›

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux

WSL lets you run a GNU/Linux command line environment integrated directly with Windows and your favorite tools, like Visual Studio Code, Outlook, etc. We generally recommend using WSL 2 for Python web development work. To enable and install WSL 2, see the WSL install documentation.

Professional feature: download PyCharm Professional to try. You can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to work with a Python interpreter available in your Linux distribution.

Should I install WSL or wsl2? ›

We recommend that you use WSL 2 as it offers faster performance and 100% system call compatibility. However, there are a few specific scenarios where you might prefer using WSL 1. Consider using WSL 1 if: Your project files must be stored in the Windows file system.

While WSL 2 uses Microsoft's Hyper-V as a hypervisor under the hood to run the utility VM, it does not require you to enable Windows' Hyper-V role or feature; WSL works perfectly fine without it.

You don't specifically need to activate an environment; activation just prepends the virtual environment's binary directory to your path, so that “python” invokes the virtual environment's Python interpreter and you can run installed scripts without having to use their full path.

Setting Up Python 3 in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

So if you would like to install NumPy, you can do so with the command pip3 install numpy . Once Python is set up, and pip and other tools are installed, we can set up a virtual environment for our development projects.

WSL vs Dual Booting

Dual Booting means installing multiple operating systems on a single computer, and being able to choose which one to boot. This means that you CANNOT run both the OS at the same time. But if you use WSL, you can use both the OS simultaneously without the need to switch the OS.

We do not recommend using WSL in VS Code without the WSL extension as you will lose support for auto-complete, debugging, linting, etc. Fun fact: this WSL extension is installed in $HOME/. vscode/extensions (enter the command ls $HOME\. vscode\extensions\ in PowerShell).

Is WSL faster than a VM? ›

Windows Subsystem for Linux

While WSL 2 actually uses the Linux kernel running under Hyper-V, you won't have as much of a performance hit than with a VM because you aren't running most of the other processes that run on a Linux system. You can run WSL with less memory than you would need for a virtual machine.

If you are using the standard flavour of Linux, open up the bash shell and type the following phrase, export PATH=”$PATH:/usr/local/bin/python” and press Enter. If you have access to either sh or ksh shell, then open up the terminal and type the following, PATH=”$PATH:/usr/local/bin/python” and press Enter.

WLinux is a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project. WLinux is a custom Linux distro built from Debian specifically for use on the WSL. While other distros are available for WSL, WLinux is the first optimized for use by users of WSL for WSL.

This is a specific feature of WSL that allows you to run GUI-based Linux apps, meaning you're not limited to using the Linux terminal for all your tasks. If you want a more user-friendly interface, GUI apps go a long way, and Windows 10 users can finally join in on the fun.

Can WSL run GUI? ›

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) now supports running Linux GUI applications (X11 and Wayland) on Windows in a fully integrated desktop experience. WSL 2 enables Linux GUI applications to feel native and natural to use on Windows.

WSL2 uses the 9P protocol to access Windows drives, and it is currently known to be very slow when compared to: Native NTFS (obviously) The ext4 filesystem on the virtual disk used by WSL2. And even the performance of WSL1 with Windows drives.

On machines running build 20175 or higher, RAM is limited to either 50% of your total memory or 8GB, whichever happens to be smaller. On builds older than 20175, WSL could consume up to 80% of your host RAM.

essentially NO, but read on to see what we actually looked at with our tests. I have been using a WSL2 a lot when I am working on a Windows 10 system. I find it makes development work MUCH more pleasant.

PIP is automatically installed with Python 2.7.9+ and Python 3.4+ and it comes with the virtualenv and pyvenv virtual environments.

A “pip: command not found” error occurs when you fail to properly install the package installer for Python (pip) needed to run Python on your computer. To fix it, you will either need to re-install Python and check the box to add Python to your PATH or install pip on your command line.

One of the most common problems with running Python tools like pip is the “not on PATH” error. This means that Python cannot find the tool you're trying to run in your current directory. In most cases, you'll need to navigate to the directory in which the tool is installed before you can run the command to launch it.

Machine learning (ML) is becoming a key part of many development workflows. Whether you're a data scientist, ML engineer, or starting your learning journey with ML the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) offers a great environment to run the most common and popular GPU accelerated ML tools.

WSL is Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is the Linux(since the WSL 2 version, the actual Linux kernel) running inside Windows. Obviously, that can't be faster than the real Linux OS running on bare metal on the same hardware, but it shouldn't be very slow.

These are almost completely interchangeable, the difference being that virtualenv supports older python versions and has a few more minor unique features, while venv is in the standard library.

Do I need to install Python in venv? ›

If you are using Python 3.3 or newer, the venv module is the preferred way to create and manage virtual environments. venv is included in the Python standard library and requires no additional installation.

A virtual Environment should be used whenever you work on any Python-based project. It is generally good to have one new virtual environment for every Python-based project you work on. So the dependencies of every project are isolated from the system and each other.

In fact, virtualenv comes with a copy of pip which gets copied into every new environment you create, so virtualenv is really all you need. You can even install it as a separate standalone package (rather than from PyPI).

Open the Windows Command Prompt enter into your Desktop folder with the command cd desktop . You can find your device's command line interface (CLI) by searching in your applications.> Type py -m venv env to create a virtual environment named env . When the environment is created, the prompt will reappear.

Linux is free :) Although there is no visible performance impact or incompatibility when working python cross-platform, the benefits of Linux for python development outweigh Windows by a lot. It's a lot more comfortable and definitely will boost your productivity. ...

Python is cross platform, the developers worked really hard to have it working fine in all platforms. If you like to use Linux and are familiar with the bash commands, like it more than Windows, then enjoy Python, which is native to Linux, update some libraries (install pip, for example) and work from there.

File performance across the Windows and Linux operating systems is faster in WSL 1 than WSL 2, so if you are using Windows applications to access Linux files, you will currently achieve faster performance with WSL 1.

👨‍💻 Programming Friendly

Linux supports almost all of the programming languages such as Clojure, Python, Julia, Ruby, C, and C++ to name a few. The Linux terminal is better than Window's command line. If you want to learn command line basics quick and super fast, you will find this course helpful.

Which OS is best for Python? ›

In general, if you are using standard software packages like JMP and RapidMiner for basic operations like analysis and model creation then go with Windows. However, Python, R, and Octave, the top three programming languages for Machine Learning, run best on Linux-based operating systems.

Almost every tutorial on Python use Linux based systems like Ubuntu. These tutorials are by experts so it's good to follow best practices used by experienced developers. When your projects get complex its very easy to find Dependencies for your projects like extensions, libraries etc. in Linux based OS.

Python has become a staple in data science, allowing data analysts and other professionals to use the language to conduct complex statistical calculations, create data visualizations, build machine learning algorithms, manipulate and analyze data, and complete other data-related tasks.

Python is a versatile, high-level interpreted language that can be used for a variety of tasks. However, its popularity has also led to it being considered slow, inefficient and outdated.

One of the coolest code editors available to programmers, Visual Studio Code, is an open-source, extensible, light-weight editor available on all platforms. It's these qualities that make Visual Studio Code from Microsoft very popular, and a great platform for Python development.

WSL2 uses the 9P protocol to access Windows drives, and it is currently known to be very slow when compared to: Native NTFS (obviously) The ext4 filesystem on the virtual disk used by WSL2. And even the performance of WSL1 with Windows drives.

WSL especially helps web developers and those working with Bash and Linux-first tools (for example, Ruby and Python) to use their tools on Windows and ensure consistency between development and production environments.

Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows. JavaScript is required to view these results or log-in to Phoronix Premium. If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10.

Most data science companies use Linux because of the obvious advantages that it provides with analysing data. Most data scientists have their codes developed and deployed on the Linux OS. Having said that, there are also companies that use Windows as their OS so one should be flexible enough to adapt to both OSs.

Linux has a reputation for being fast and smooth while Windows 10 is known to become slow and slow over time. Linux runs faster than Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 along with a modern desktop environment and qualities of the operating system while Windows is slow on older hardware.