wsl-distrod VS WSL2-Linux-Kernel

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.

Quite a strange limitation in my opinion. I understand that dealing with subnetting/host network rebinding to allow full IPv6 can be a challenge (especially if you're on DHCPv6 or some other manually managed thing instead of normal SLAAC) but surely Microsoft could use whatever NAT solution they use for IPv4 to work on IPv6 as well?

Apparently support for the protocol can already be enabled (https://github.com/nathanchance/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/issues/25). This makes it technically possible to use a WireGuard tunnel for IPv6 support, at least...

I think you might be able to start with an even more minimal rootfs than that one if you used Distrod (plus you'd end up with a WSL2 Ubuntu distro that has systemd working (then also use a custom kernel like this or this for snapd, apparmor etc support - their latest versions are 11.7 and 12.4 MB each).

Requirement seems to be Win11 though, and you do need to update the WSL2 kernel to the latest one in their repo ( https://github.com/nathanchance/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/releases ) I used v63. This fixes the reboot loop the QEMU VM goes after/during OSX XNU kernel boot.

The culprit was the kernel. Bleeding-edge based on https://github.com/nathanchance/WSL2-Linux-Kernel. The default 5.10.60 works.

Good that I already run my own kernel anyway based on https://github.com/nathanchance/WSL2-Linux-Kernel