A preinstallation kit is available for system integrators and OEMs interested in prepackaging Windows Terminal with a Windows image. More information is available in the DISM documentation on preinstallation. Users who do not intend to preinstall Windows Terminal should continue using the msixbundle distribution.

If you intend on using Terminal as an unpackaged application--that is, extracting the msix file--we recommend that you use the Win10 bundle. You will need the Visual C++ runtime redistributable.

In addition, if you install the packaged version on either Windows 10 or Windows 11, it now depends on the Visual C++ Universal Runtime Package.

Despite these distributions having different version numbers, they are built from the same code and there is no functional difference between them.

If you install the Windows 10 verison on Windows 11, it will probably automatically upgrade itself to the Windows 11 version. It turns out that it is impossible to have two bundles with the same version number, so it has to be this way.