It's not necessary to do it this way, but you can restart your computer from the PowerShell console by typing Restart-Computer and hitting Enter. Once complete, save and close down all your documents and restart your machine. Now we need to enable those disabled features: the Windows Subsystem for Linux version 1 (WSL1) and the Virtual Machine Platform.Įnter the following commands into the PowerShell console, hitting Enter after each: dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestartĭism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all Enable WSL1 and the Virtual Machine Platform This will pull up a big blue console window.ģ. In the Windows search bar at the bottom-left of the screen, type in Windows PowerShell, and left-click the matching result. To quickly and easily change some Windows settings (i.e., enable some features that are disabled by default), we can use the Windows PowerShell. To check this, press the Windows logo key and the R key at the same time (⊞+R), type in winver, and hit Enter. Do not proceed to further steps until this one is complete. When done, you should have Windows 10 version 1903, 1909, 2004, or 20H2 (or higher). Install all updates (this might take a while), restarting when required. In the Windows search bar at the bottom-left of the screen, type in Check for updates and left-click the matching result (or click here).

We want to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 (WSL2), but to do so we need to update a recent build of Windows 10. Although there are several such guides already (linked below), this one combines the content of several and, through the use of screenshots and examples, is meant to be especially accessible to those without prior Linux experience. This is useful if you want to run R for Linux (e.g., due to its faster computation and better parallelization or simply to do cross-platform development) while on a Windows machine. Here is a super-easy visual guide to setting up and running RStudio Server for Ubuntu 20 on Windows 10.

Update rstudio windows