How to install and use WSL in the Microsoft Storeįirst make sure you have these pre-requisites: You can find our up to date changelog of improvements here on the WSL docs.

Added wsl.exe -version command which displays relevant version information.

This change switches wsl -install to not require the -distribution argument but maintains support to avoid breaking existing scripts.

Switched wsl -install to not require the -distribution argument.

Added progress indicator helper function used to show a Please Wait message with animated dots on the conversion process to show users that WSL is still running.

This change adds support for optionally naming a mountpoint when mounting a disk through WSL. This change implements filesystem type detection if no -type is specified when using wsl.exe -mount.

Implement filesystem detection for wsl -mount.

Add -mount -vhd to make mounting VHD files easier.

WSLg is now bundled as part of the WSL app!.

We’ve already added in some new features that can be found in this preview such as: So now once new features like GUI app support, GPU compute, and Linux file system drive mounting are developed, tested and ready for a release you will get access to it right away on your machine without needing to update your entire Windows OS, or going to Windows Insider preview builds. This decouples WSL from your Windows version, allowing you to update through the Microsoft Store instead. This change moves those binaries from being part of the Windows image, to instead being part of an application that you install from the Store. The actual binaries that make up WSL’s logic in that optional component are part of the Windows image, and are serviced and updated as part of Windows itself.

This means that you would go to the “Turn Windows Features on or off” dialogue to enable it, requiring you to restart your machine.

Traditionally, WSL has been installed as an optional component inside of Windows.

There are two big reasons to be excited for this change: You can get access to WSL features faster, and you don’t have to worry about changing your Windows version when getting the latest WSL updates.

Why would you want to install WSL from the Microsoft Store? We’ve created this as an initial preview to help ensure quality before making this generally available. This is the exact same WSL that you know and love, all that we’ve changed is where it gets installed and updated from.

Maui revealed