wsl-distrod VS bedrocklinux-userland

Systemd works even in the non-store Windows 10 using https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod

In case you're using an older version of WSL that doesn't support systemd, you can give Distrod a try.

It uses snapd (so in turn, systemd) so maybe that's what you missed. Up until the WSL update that brought systemd support I've been using distrod to have systemd in my WSL2 distros so it went all smoothly for me.

I use distrod to get a wsl instance of Arch running. It's nice to have (some) systemd functionality with it ;)

You don't need Docker Desktop to install Linux distros as your WSL2 systems. For Arch there's https://github.com/yuk7/ArchWSL and if you want systemd too then use this one instead https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod/ (not specific to just Arch). Also any OCI compliant rootfs tarball goes really, you can use Docker or Podman to export images as tarballs & import them as WSL distros and vice versa. Just telling in case all you want is a distro and not a container engine like Docker running.

You can install the snap version if you have snap running (duh) so, I recommend you to either add systemd to your Ubuntu or make a new Ubuntu installation, both with this one: https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod/.

Not sure on the specifics for why it won’t install for you, but I’d recommend trying a tool called distrod regardless. You can get Ubuntu Jammy with it and it makes the distro support systemd.

Install the resolvconf package and write the nameserver etc lines into /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base file instead (or depending on your needs, use systemd by using a tool like Distrod and edit /etc/systemd/resolved.conf instead).

I used Distrod tool to install WSL that has extra features like systemd, auto-start and port forwarding ability.

https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod I use this at work with Gentoo and it's worked fine.

Back when I used a debian based distribution I made use of https://bedrocklinux.org/ to make use of the AUR. It's not for everyone though.

Now this is interesting... apparently it is possible to run Nix AKA "The Nix Package Manager" on Alpine -- despite the fact that Alpine is Busybox and Musl based and NixOS is Coreutils and Glibc based!

Well done Nix engineers and contributors!

(I may switch to Alpine w/Nix Package Manager in the future, depending on how well it works!)

Related:

Bedrock Linux: https://bedrocklinux.org/

Sure, just install Bedrock Linux and add the Arch stratum on top

There's a Bedrock Linux distro already...

Bedrock Linux. It is allows you to make a system out of various seemingly-incompatible parts of other distros. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but it's really cool.

If you want to actually use multiple distributions at once integrated tightly into each other (like using Ubuntu with AUR packages) I highly recommend https://bedrocklinux.org/. It uses some chroot and symbolic link magic to share files across filesystems.