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WSL Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to WSL
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AppSignal
Monitoring that respects your time & budget. APM, error tracking, and dashboards for modern web apps. Ten-minute setup, transparent flat pricing, and support from engineers who actually use the product.
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claude-code
Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and handling git workflows - all through natural language commands.
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
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distrobox
Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox
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AreWeAntiCheatYet
A comprehensive and crowd-sourced list of games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine.
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winapps
Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. (by Fmstrat)
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SaaSHub
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wslg
Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
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sdk
Core functionality needed to create .NET Core projects, that is shared between Visual Studio and CLI (by dotnet)
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garden
Automation for Kubernetes development and testing. Spin up production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand. Use the same configuration and workflows at every step of the process. Speed up your builds and test runs via shared result caching
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xWSL
Installer script for Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 with XFCE Desktop on WSL. Does not require hypervisor, container, or X11 server.
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NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better WSL alternative or higher similarity.
WSL discussion
WSL reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of WSL.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2026-10-10.
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WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/3.0.1
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Summing RSS Is Not Your WSL2 Memory Usage
microsoft/WSL on GitHub
- WSL 3.0.1
- My first open source feature request
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Fixing WSL 2.7.x `ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND` After an Update
Next, let's move to fix the problem. First, let's download the MSI WSL package where we can get the system.vhd from (or any other missing file).
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Why WSL2 Is Slow on /mnt/c, and How to Find the Exact Operation Costing You Time
9P has a cap on how much data a single round trip can carry (the msize parameter). On the Windows-side client, that value currently isn't something you can change — it's fixed (microsoft/WSL#9125). If you've seen a guide claiming you can raise it to fix slowness, that may be describing the Linux-side mount options for a different setup — it doesn't apply to the Windows-side client.
- Bring back human
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Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
There have been massive GitHub issue spams recently, including in Microsoft's WSL repository.
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/40028
- WSL's GitHub repository is being hit with a wave of Chinese spam issues
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Using VHD-Distributed Kernel Modules in WSL2
Reference: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/12586
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 16 Oct 2026
Stats
Basic WSL repo stats
450
34,098
9.8
2 days ago
microsoft/WSL is an open source project licensed under MIT License which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of WSL is C++.
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