spyder and paraview are available on Ubuntu, so you’ll be certainly able to install them inside your linux subsystem. Within linux they run as X11 applications, so getting X11 to run from your virtual Ubuntu machine inside Windows will be the challenge. Some configuration will be needed to communicate the X11 display between the linux subsystem and the windows host system. I’m not sure what needs to be done exactly to make that work, or whether it’s difficult or easy. There’s likely to be some discussion about it somewhere. It might need installation of an X server on Windows, which would handle the display of the applications.
For the record, I had to do that a while ago, and it works well.
Here is what I did, if anyone needs to do the same:
- Install VcXsrv on windows, and run the executable
- Check the ‘disable access control’ checkbox in the VcXsrv config
- Export the X11 server address to the DISPLAY variable in the WSL session. To do so, add the following line to ~/.bashrc (or whatever your shell is)
export DISPLAY=$(grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf | awk '{print $2}'):0.0
That should be enough to enable launching X11 apps from WSL.