Upgrading your Ubuntu-on-Windows install to the app version

Canonical

on 3 August 2017

This article was last updated 8 years ago.


Our team and Microsoft recently released Ubuntu as a Windows app store application! If you toyed with the “bash on Ubuntu on Windows” version before and would like to try the latest and greatest, read on!

Saving your data

If your “bash on ubuntu on windows” environment has some data you’d like to keep, make sure you back it up now. The uninstall process will nuke everything.

Uninstall the old way

This is relatively simple. Opening a command line (cmd.exe) terminal and typing

lxrun /uninstall

will destroy your previous environment.

Installing the new way

To find the app in the Microsoft store, just type “Ubuntu” in the search bar. Click install. Voilà!

Talk to us today

Interested in running Ubuntu in your organisation?

Newsletter signup

Get the latest Ubuntu news and updates in your inbox.

By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical's Privacy Policy.

Related posts

Canonical at KubeCon Europe 2026: NVIDIA donates the GPU DRA driver to the CNCF

Previewing at KubeCon 2026: Canonical welcomes NVIDIA’s donation of the GPU DRA driver to CNCF. At KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam, NVIDIA announced that it will...

Hot code burns: the supply chain case for letting your containers cool before you ship

Zero CVEs doesn’t mean secure. It means unexamined. New code has zero CVEs because no one has studied it yet, and if you’re rebuilding nightly from upstream,...

Canonical joins the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member

Canonical’s Gold-level investment in the Rust Foundation supports the long-term health of the Rust programming language and highlights its growing role in...