The Windows Subsystem for Linux keeps picking up momentum. GitHub Copilot‘s desktop app just added experimental WSL support, and while that marinates, Google quietly confirmed it is working on WSL for Antigravity, its agentic development platform, along with better native support for Windows, which is rare from a company with a spotty history of supporting Windows.
WSL lets you run a Linux distribution directly inside Windows, without dual-booting or using a full virtual machine. So much of modern software, such as build pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and AI frameworks like PyTorch and llama.cpp, is written and tested on Linux first.
In case you didn’t realise it already, both Antigravity and GitHub Copilot are in the same category of AI development tools, and while WSL is now experimentally supported in the GitHub Copilot app, Google is working on WSL for Antigravity.
WSL2 runs a Linux kernel inside a lightweight, Microsoft-managed VM, so tools like Docker, bash, and Linux-native package managers work as developers expect, all while staying on Windows. Microsoft has been working on improving WSL as a serious platform, and this week’s news from Google is the clearest sign yet that the bet paid off.
Google is finally supporting WSL and native Windows, and that’s rare
It’s an open secret that Google has rarely been generous toward Windows. Most of its developer tools either treat Windows as an afterthought or bring in RAM-heavy browser-based apps instead of native ones. But things seem to be changing, at least for Antigravity.
The setup is under Settings, Experimental, where a new “WSL hosts (Preview)” toggle lets the app “connect to and create sessions inside WSL.” Once enabled, a separate Environments page lists every WSL 2 distribution installed through wsl.exe, in this case an Ubuntu distro marked default and running. Connecting it shows a live WebSocket address, and from there, you register a project by pointing to its absolute Linux path, something like /home/pboggan/coloring-book, which the app validates before adding.
Starting a new session against that project shows a “WSL: Ubuntu” badge at the top, confirming the session runs inside the Linux distro. In the demo, Boggan typed a prompt asking the agent to add a footer reading “Made in Park City, UT”. The agent loaded a frontend-design skill, searched the Next.js project’s page.tsx, layout.tsx, and globals.css files, ran git status –short && git branch directly inside WSL to check the current state, found an existing styled footer, and edited it with a single-line change.
It then re-checked the file to confirm the new text was correct and ran git diff –check to validate the change before showing a “Create PR” button. The whole loop with reasoning, file edits, and git validation ran inside WSL, powered by a model listed as GPT-5.6 Sol.
GitHub’s internal . Separately, Microsoft shipped to see how it holds up in practice.
Windows is quietly becoming a serious developer platform again
Despite the near-constant negative press Windows 11 gets over ads, bugs, and forced AI features, the developer side of the OS has had a strong stretch. At Build 2026, Microsoft rolled out Coreutils for Windows, bringing over 75 familiar Linux command-line utilities like ls, grep, and mv natively to Windows without needing WSL at all, built on the open-source uutils project in Rust. WinUI’s commitment as the permanent native app framework, plus its move toward full open source, shows Microsoft treating native Windows development as a priority again.
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