Thought Leadership
According to Canonical, the number of Ubuntu installations via WSL is now growing faster than that of native desktop installations.
The statement was uncovered by the trade publication Windows Latest, which found it in an interview published several months ago in the newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer with Jon Seager, Vice President of Engineering at Canonical. In it, Seager explained that within a year, growth in their own WSL user numbers was significantly higher than growth in traditional desktop user numbers.
He said he expected to record more Ubuntu users via WSL than so-called native Ubuntu users in the coming months, particularly among those working in the field of machine learning or AI. Many developers rely professionally on a Windows computer provided by their employer, but need a Linux environment for their actual work, for which WSL is significantly easier to use than traditional dual-booting.
WSL allows users to set up a complete Linux environment within Windows and operate it via a terminal, while Windows remains in use as the actual main operating system. According to Seager, many employees consciously choose Windows as their base system for professional reasons and specifically fall back on Ubuntu via WSL when needed—an approach that is now causing pure WSL installation numbers to grow faster than those of the actual, natively installed Linux version.
How reliable the statement about Ubuntu actually is
Since the cited interview took place several months ago and has only now received broader attention, it cannot be ruled out that the development described by Seager has already occurred. The specific statement explicitly refers only to the ratio of WSL installation numbers to native Ubuntu desktop installation numbers at Canonical itself, not to the general market share of Linux compared to Windows overall. Globally, the vast majority of global data center and server infrastructure still runs on Linux, of which pure WSL installation numbers on Windows desktops represent only a comparatively small fraction.
(Editorial Team)
