WLinux Overview

by mmyoji

2 min read

wlinux wsl

I usually use Ubuntu desktop for my development environment, and sometimes (or often) think about the possibility to use WSL(Windows Subsystem for Linux) for that.

I'd installed WSL Ubuntu in my Windows10 PC, and occasionally found there is WLinux in place of it.

What is WLinux

The official page says:

A Linux distro optimized for WSL based on Debian.

Okay, but I doubt it unless I try to use it.

I bought this distro from Microsoft Store (currently 51% discount!) and have tried it a little.

What I found about WLinux

tl;dr

  • terminal bug
  • wsl-setup command is useful for light use
  • can use apt to install packages (have some troubles)
  • snap isn't installed

Terminal Bug

Unlike Ubuntu on WSL, it includes terminal app but this has some bugs like this.

The issue was like following:

  1. Set the font setting as Consolas, for example. (Default font is MS Gothic)
  2. Start new tmux session or run vim
  3. The font setting is reset and becomes MS Gothic. (Sucks)

And I found you can avoid this like the below workaround:

  1. Start new tmux session first.
  2. then change the font setting.
  3. Whenever you open a new tmux window or start vim, the font setting is unchanged.

Great!

wsl-setup command

With using this command, you can easily setup your development environment,

  1. Install your favorite editor: neovim, emacs, vscode
  2. Install the dependencies for your favorite programming languages: ruby, go, node, etc.
  3. etc.

Internally, this runs apt command, so you can also do this by yourself (and I did).

I normally use anyenv to install and manage programming language and its versions.

In this distro, I also do the same thing and install goenv and ndenv, then run each, both works well!

apt can be used like debian distro

WLinux is based on Debian, and you can use apt command to install packages.

But some packages are very old like hugo and I used other installation way for that.

snap is not installed

I introduced snap command the past post. This command is not installed in this distro.

You have to install this through apt. But I cannot install it with apt install snapd due to dependencies error.

Summary

I explained what I found about WLinux in this post.

I recommend Ubuntu rather than WLinux currently because of some troubles.

But I will still use this distro and hope this would be more famouse and more useful one for WSL.