Hands-On Windows 202 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands On Windows, we're going to take a look at the virtualization features in Windows 11. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands On Windows. I'm Paul Theriault, and this week I thought I would take a look at some of the several virtualization features that Microsoft ships in Windows 11. So virtualization, Is a way to run another OS, or the same OS really, if you want, in a virtualized software environment, right? Often in a window on top of the operating system you're using, right? There's usually interaction capabilities between the host, which is the computer you're using, and the guest, which is some virtual environment. All of these features are available in Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:52]:
None are enabled by default. All of them are installed using this crazy user interface from the past called— actually in Settings— Windows Features, which is a control panel. 2 of the 3 features require Windows 11 Pro. So the one that does not is— where is this? It's not even in here anymore because I've installed it already, but it's called WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux. That works with Windows 11 Home and Pro. The other 2 features are Hyper-V and Windows Sandbox, and those require Windows 11 Pro. So we will look at that. So I've already installed this.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:36]:
It's, you know, because it's time-consuming, it'd be kind of weird to go through that. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. I did do it from that Windows Features Control Panel. You can do it from, you know, WinGet from the command line. You can do it actually, I think, from the Microsoft Store, if I'm not mistaken. There's different ways to do this. But When you install WSL, you get a couple of different things. You get file system integration with the virtual environment.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:00]:
You get the ability to install one or more distributions. So let me bring up a terminal window. I don't think that needs to be admin. Let me bump up the font. If I just type WSL, and so this is in PowerShell, this is outside of any, anything related to Linux, it will just go into whatever Linux environment I've installed. In this case, I believe, yeah, it was Ubuntu. Not that that matters too, too much, but you can do all the normal kind of Linuxy stuff from there if you want. I'm going to exit out of that.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:33]:
The other way to do it is just to do it from the Start menu icon, right? So this brings up a window specific in this case to Ubuntu. It's going to be the same thing basically as before. Oops, I did the wrong thing there. Show me, show us where we are. I can, you know, Oops. Go to— I'm not a Linux expert, obviously, but I can kind of go in and out of that, et cetera. So that's cool. You can run Linux command lines from here.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:00]:
So if you're a developer or an IT admin, you need that kind of thing. That's great. You can actually run or install and then run certain Linux graphical applications, including big ones. Like if you wanted Chrome or Edge, you know, the Linux version running, you could do that. I don't, I don't know why you would other than to test it, but I did install a couple of things in here. This is one, which is Nautilus, is a GNOME file manager application, which is kind of interesting. And then let me get out of that. And then I think the other one is the GNOME text editor, which is this little guy here, very white.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
Okay. So that's, that's fine. The interesting thing to me though is, well, running those apps is interesting, but the ability to kind of go back and forth between windows. And Linux is useful and interesting. And it's going to vary depending on what your needs are here. But I can bring up, like I did this before with a different file. Let me find a, see what's not problematic here, I guess. But you could copy this from here, right? Go into the file system.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:15]:
Now, if I had, uh, you know, Debian and other distros, I'd have all those options here as well. But this is the one I use, um, the home folder, right? Which is that, uh, default view you get from the Linux command line. And then I can just kind of paste it in there. So that's like one way. It's not the only way, but it's kind of, it's a useful thing because once you're in the command line, like here, um, close that. I can, uh, Oh, cd, where am I? cd Paul. And so I can see what's in here. I copied these things over here earlier, but this is the thing I just copied, right? And so that's actually kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:50]:
It's, you know, you can see it on both sides. That works pretty well. I could use that. Oh, I already killed it. That's the problem there. If I wanted to bring up the, let's do it this way, that text editor again. I can open, you know, the file right from there. So within Linux, it's very useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:11]:
So that's very interesting. This is useful for, you know, like I said, developers, IT admins. If you just want to learn Linux, I mean, it's kind of a great way to do it without having to go to the pain and trouble of, you know, trying to just bring a computer up with that thing directly. So that's available, like I said, to everybody. So 2 other virtualization features that are Provided with Windows 11, but not enabled or installed by default, right? So the first one is Windows Sandbox. It doesn't even really have a Start menu thing going on here. Like it doesn't put it up on the front page there, but you could use Start search easily enough to find it. So what this is, is a very lightweight virtual machine that's based on the computer you're using right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:53]:
It's stripped down, so it doesn't show you all the apps and things you have. It runs in this little window. It's got this goofy bug where it has 2 of these icons. I don't know what's going on. That's been happening for a while. If you look at the Start menu, you can see that— well, it's not easy to see, but you can see there's really not much there. It's just the basics. Even if you went into Settings, for example, and there's no Windows Update, there's nothing to do here.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:21]:
The point of this environment is so that you can test some software that you think is suspicious or you're nervous that it might do something bad to your computer. So you might, maybe you downloaded something. I'll just use this like random kind of file, whatever this is. Maybe SmartScreen threw up a flag, or maybe it got, there was a warning, maybe the executable isn't signed or whatever it might be. And you're like, well, I just want to see if this thing's okay. You can run it in this virtual environment instead. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. One of those ways is not drag and drop.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:52]:
So you can see I can't do that. But By default, clipboard reflection is turned on. So if I use— I'll right-click so you can actually see it— but if I copy this to the clipboard and then switch back here and then right-click and do paste, it actually is going to put that file in here, right? So I could run this and, you know, if it was an executable and see what happens. You can resize the window. It will scale with it. It will scale with it in really weird ways. So if you have kind of— you want to do it this way, you can get a desktop that is very unusual for Windows. Um, but when you close this thing, it's gone.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:25]:
So this file that I added, the 2 icons I deleted, that's all, it's all going back to the way it was before. Um, and that's by design. This is literally just a temporary environment that you run, uh, to test it. So when you close this thing, it's going to warn you like, look, you just want to make sure, you know, like everything's gone. You're like, yep. Um, and so if I were to run that again, it would just come up, um, the way it was before. Right. So cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:48]:
Like that works, uh, that works really well for that purpose. Um, if you need a more general, uh, virtualization environment, like, uh, people have been running for, I mean, decades really, um, Microsoft provides the Hyper-V client, uh, for Pro and up, uh, in Windows as well. And this is, this is like kind of the— I'm gonna just put this down a little bit, so bright. Um, but this is a, um, like kind of a traditional, uh, although it's, it's hypervisor-based, this is running on the hardware, but It allows you to run any number of virtual machines. You can install these things off of ISOs. There is some distinction if you're running on x86, like an Intel or AMD-based PC versus an ARM-based PC. You can only use virtual machines designed for that architecture. So if you're on ARM, you can't create an x86 virtual machine, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:37]:
I created a couple earlier on this computer. I'll just run this one now so you can get an idea of what it looks like. So this is Debian. Linux, which is probably, for some reason, is trying to run in some crazy— I read because it's the screen. Let me, uh, I'm just moving it to a different screen so I can, uh, bring this sucker back. Let me see if that works. There we go. A little bit better.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:00]:
Um, and then I'll resume it. I paused it. Sorry. So if this thing would ever come back, let's see. I don't think you Yeah, it's too— it's the resolution thing is screwing it up. Well, I'll just— I will just kill it. So I'll start this thing from scratch. I tried to make that work more efficiently.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:18]:
That was my mistake. Anyway, you can choose what you're doing here. I probably still have the ISO. No, I do not. That's good. But you kind of get the rough idea here. So run this thing full screen. You know, Debian starts up, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:33]:
So while that's doing its thing, I just wanted to point out a couple of things that are going on here. You can use this to capture the screen. There's some light clipboard integration here. So if I were, you know, doing something over here, copy that to the clipboard, I could paste it here. You know, if there was some field open, you know, in an app or whatever, where that might make some sense. I'll log into my account here. Yeah, I did this on a higher resolution. I would call it a normal screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:02]:
So this looks a little strange. Um, but you get the idea. So this is, uh, you know, your basic kind of Linux, um, interface, um, graph— you know, graphical user interface, the whole, the actual operating system, right? But running, uh, in this kind of software virtualization environment on top of Windows. Um, there's lots of things to kind of know here, but, um, I will just say if you, um, are bringing up a Windows virtual machine, one of the things you need to know is that This needs to be enabled. It's not by default. I actually don't know why, but you enable Trusted Platform Module. If you don't do that, this thing will not work. If you are using Linux, like in that Debian install below, you actually have to change the— this is kind of like the virtual BIOS, if you will, or the firmware.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:44]:
You change it to Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority. Otherwise, Linux will not boot, right? So each of those have that one weird environment. You can use— you can create different virtual switches, which is for networking, just Use the default switch. It has all kinds, you can create disks and you can add ISOs as virtual disks, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a full environment and it kind of enables a nice back and forth. It's a little big on the screen, I apologize again, but very useful. I will say third-party tools are often better. One of the problems, especially in Windows, is that if you run Windows 11 in a virtual machine in Hyper-V, Um, the graphics are often off a bit and, uh, it doesn't support sound, which is kind of crazy to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:35]:
Oh, here we go. That's what I was looking for earlier. Sorry about that. Um, and on this one, interestingly, with, uh, with Linux, the sound works fine, right? So I don't understand that exactly, but, um, a couple of options. Uh, Oracle VirtualBox is free and that works fantastically. In fact, it does the display scaling thing much, much better than this does. And it supports sound in Windows, which is nice. Um, if you're on a Mac, Parallels Desktop is great.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:00]:
It's expensive. You have to pay for it, but, um, you know, I mean, that's it. It's a great option and I'm not a Mac guy, but if you want to, want to run Windows on a Mac, like that's kind of the ideal way to do things. Um, in either case, if you're running a virtual machine here with Windows or on a Mac with Parallels or whatever solution, um, you're going to need a Windows 11 product key. We've talked about this before. You can get these things cheap online. Like don't buy this from Microsoft for $150 or $200. Google this or, you know, search for online, you know, cheap Windows 11 product keys.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:30]:
They're out there, you know, for as little as $10. So you don't have to spend a lot of money on that. And if you're running Linux like here, you don't have to spend any money at all, right? So this is super useful. This is great for all kinds of— I use this for the book if I need to take shots of things that are happening in Windows that are occurring outside of Windows, right? Where you can't normally take a screenshot, the thing's booting up maybe, or showing the lock screen, whatever it might be. this is a way to do this. Great for developers, you know, IT admins, et cetera. So just kind of nice to know about. And I will, I'll just kill that thing, which is, that's not the best way to do that, but yeah, let's bring, oh, that's the wrong one.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:08]:
That's why. Yeah, I'll just turn it off. But normally you would do that, you would just do that from in the environment like you do in a real computer, but how you use it is up to you. Okay. I hope you found this useful and interesting. There is a new episode of this podcast every Thursday. You can learn more about that at twit.tv/how. Uh, thank you so much for watching.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:31]:
Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. Love you.