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

Canonical

on 3 August 2017

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

DirtyClone Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability fixes available

On June 25, 2026, JFrog published their research into CVE-2026-43503, referring to the vulnerability as DirtyClone. The vulnerability had previously been...

pedit COW kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability mitigations

Mitigations are available for the Linux vulnerability with CVE ID CVE-2026-46331. The CVE ID was assigned on June 16 2026 and highlighted as a local privilege...

Canonical becomes Gold Sponsor of Trifecta Tech Foundation

Canonical is pleased to announce it is now a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, a non-profit that creates open source building blocks for critical...