Ubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” is now available as a Hyper-V image

If you are frequently using Hyper-V, you might be pleasantly surprised to know that Microsoft has added a new Ubuntu virtual machine image to the Hyper-V Quick Create feature. It takes exactly one click now to get a working 19.04 Ubuntu instance.

Ubuntu is the most well known Linux distro with quite a long history. It was started by Mark Shuttleworth's company 'Canonical' in order to popularize Linux amongst home users, make it user friendly and highly available to everyone. At the beginning, Canonical used to send free discs with Ubuntu to any user who requested them. The operating system was using Gnome 2 as its desktop environment and included all the popular and mainstream apps at that time, including GIMP, XChat, Pidgin, etc.

Back in September 2018 Microsoft announced the availability of optimised 18.04 LTS desktop images for Microsoft’s Hyper-V gallery bring a host of benefits including:

• Improved clipboard integration
• Dynamic desktop resizing
• Shared folders for easy host/guest file transfer
• Improved mouse experience, seamlessly moving between the host and guest desktops.

Today, a new Ubuntu 19.04 image became available along with the LTS version. This will help make life a bit easier for people working with Ubuntu desktop on Windows.

This is a really nice addition to Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is officially limited to console apps and services. It requires dirty hacks to run GUI apps at the moment of this writing.

Create Ubuntu 19.04 Virtual Machine with Hyper-V Quick Create

1. Enable Hyper-V in optional features if you don't have it installed.
2. Type Quick Create in Cortana/Search on the taskbar.
3. Select Hyper-V Quick Create in the search result.
4. Select Ubuntu 19.04 as shown below.

In the future, Microsoft is planning to provide the latest LTS and the most recent non-LTS release. That way you can choose between the known quantity of the LTS or the freshest release.