With the VM set up, I kept all of my source code directly inside of the VM and then mounted one of my data hard drives into the VM as well. I’m a practical person and I don’t mind using older software but I don’t want to base my development environment on an unsupported distribution of Linux. I have nothing against Xubuntu 14.x but at the time of this article, the 16.x release has been out for ages and I don’t want to be stuck using 14.x when 18.x eventually rolls along. Most of them had graphical anomalies that would make it unusable and Xubuntu was the only distro I found that worked. The support for other flavors of Ubuntu were pretty poor too. VMware officially dropped support for running Linux guests inside of Unity mode and Xubuntu 14.x is the last version that supports it. If you want to jump straight into the “how”, then click here. Why Switch Away From VMware and Unity Mode?īefore I go into how I set up the new development environment I want to talk about the issues with the VMware set up because I think the “why” is equally as important as the “how”. If you’re on Windows and want to also run Linux tools (even graphical apps and Docker) you’ll learn how to set everything up by reading this article. Spoiler alert: This new set up is the best way I’ve come across to run both Linux and Windows together.

If you’re interested in a demo video showing the setup, check out this article. It got to the point where I woke up one day and backed up my source code and then rage uninstalled VMware followed by deleting the 100GB VM image. Overall, it was a pretty solid set up but it had a few annoying issues. I would consider it to be the successor to this blog post.įrom about 2012 to 2017 I was using VMware’s Unity mode to seamlessly run Linux applications on Windows without having to dual boot. If you’re interested in that video you can check it out here. In mid 2020 I also recorded a video recap of all of the tools I use and how to install them. I’ll try to point out those updates during the article. This article was originally written in 2017, so lots of things have changed. Quick Jump: Why Switch Away From VMware and Unity Mode? | WSL, ConEmu and MobaXterm to the Rescue | Getting Docker Up and Running | What's the Verdict?

You no longer need a VM to run graphical Linux apps on Windows. Updated on June 2nd, 2020 in #dev-environment, #linux Using WSL and MobaXterm to Create a Linux Dev Environment on Windows The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is ready for prime time.

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