Installation

• Official doc

From Microsoft Store

Open Store and search distro like Ubuntu or Debian.

Choose your distro and install it, you will have access from Start menu to define your username and password.

More

• If you want to use your new WSL with nice terminal, check Windows terminal

• If you want to improve your WSL with WSL 2

• Official doc

• blog.eleven-labs.com: french article

• korben.info: french article

If don't want to install anything for Store, you can choose some other options.

Without Microsoft Store

From CLI

• ghacks.net: install from single command

Find list of all distros

wsl --list --online

Lists all available Linux distributions that you may install using the wsl command. Currently, these are:

• Ubuntu: Ubuntu
• Debian: Debian GNU/Linux
• kali-linux: Kali Linux Rollin
• openSUSE-42: openSUSE Leap 42
• SLES-12 SUSE: Linux Enterprise Server v12
• Ubuntu-16.04: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• Ubuntu-18.04: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Ubuntu-20.04: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Install your distro

wsl --install -d <DistroName>

With appx

You can download any distro in .appx format to install it.

Manual

You can manually download distros from docs.microsoft.com.

CommandLine

To find distro name, check link of each distro on docs.microsoft.com, some examples here:

• wslubuntu2004
• wsl-debian-gnulinux

PowerShell

Example with Ubuntu 20.04

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004 -OutFile Ubuntu.appx -UseBasicParsing

cURL

Example with Ubuntu 20.04

curl.exe -L -o Ubuntu.appx https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004

Install .appx

Add-AppxPackage .\Ubuntu.appx