x11-over-vsock VS wsl-distrod

That vsock thing can be done with GWSL/VcXsrv too. Check this out: https://github.com/nbdd0121/wsld

Those that don't want to pay for it, checkout these two neat open source projects called GWSL & WSLD (for vsock). These days I don't care much about using the Linux GUI stuff on Windows anymore, as Microsoft is winning, but once I have to be more serious about it I'll use them again (or do something else.)

This way WSLg will be disabled but you can still use the X servers (like VcXsrv or the other tools that use it like GWSL) which can use X over TCP or X over vsock (there's WSLD which uses vsock for a more stable & reliable connection).

wsld can do the same for regular xserver which to me currently looks like best option.

With the Ubuntu 21.04 Community Preview from MS Store (with the ubuntu.Interop.advancedipdetection: true) it's fine but, if that isn't a distro that one would like to use then WSLD helps with that as well. You can see my post here from a while ago for a quick reference too.

Sure, but the experience is pretty rough. It only renders at a single given DPI, so it's bad if you have say, a 4K laptop and 1080p external monitor. And since you have to go over TCP unless you use WSL1 (or some hacks that require admin access), it drops all X11 connections if you suspend/resume in WSL2.

For automatic startup follow the instructions here (setup using Task Scheduler & ~/.profile / ~/.bash_profile / ~/.zlogin).

Install vcxsrv and use X11 forwarding from your Guest to Windows via TCP. If you want this to be really lickety-split or if you do work that messes with your network connection, you can use VSOCK via x11-over-vsock. To get sound working, you can probably install Pulseaudio on windows and connect to your Linux guest that way.

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.