Microsoft has made its Windows Subsystem for Linux open source. The announcement was made as its BUILD 2025 developer conference.

The announcement closes a nearly nine-year-old request from the developer community, and signals a new era of collaboration between Microsoft and open-source contributors.

Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), making its source code available on GitHub, except for a few components that are part of Windows.

Even more feature-rich desktop distributions like Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop, Kubuntu with KDE, or Linux Mint will run smoothly on any hardware that previously ran Windows 10.

Windows 10 support ends in 2025, leaving millions of PCs behind. Linux emerges as a lightweight, flexible alternative for older hardware.