Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is one of the best options if you need both Windows and Linux at the same time but do not want to setup a dual-boot. WSL allows you to install a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, etc and you can use Linux applications and tools directly on Windows.

Prerequisites

Before install WSL you must ensure your Windows machine has been setup appropriately.

  • Generally you must be running Windows 10 version 2004 and higher or Windows 11 to use the installation commands below. Otherwise you need to install the WSL manually.
  • Another important thing is that the Virtualization on your machine must be enabled. If not sure, you can open the task manager and click the Performance tab to check. If it shows your machine is running as virtual machine rather than virtualization, you must enable the virtualization.
  • Also, your Windows features like Virtual Machine Platform and Windows Subsystem for Linux must be enabled.

If your are not sure how to enable the required features, you can use a search engine or ChatGPT and Bard to help you.

WSL installation via commands

Once the prerequisites are met, WSL can be installed easily using the following commands:

# Show available Linux distributions
wsl -l -o
# Install a distribution such as `wsl --install -d Ubuntu-22.04`
wsl --install -d <Distribution Name>
# Show installed Linux distributions
wsl -l -v

Configuration to limit WSL memory usage

If you do not limit the amount of memory your WSL can use, it might use most of the memory available on your machine. This might slow down your Windows applications.

To limit the memory that can be used by WSL, you can setup it in your WSL configuration file by appending (lines must be ended with the Unix newline terminator):

[wsl2]
memory=4GB

Note that the WSL configuration file usually can be found at C:\Users\<your-user-name>\.wslconfig.

After the configuration setting update, run the bellow commands:

# Run it in Windows terminal
wsl --shutdown # Restart WSL
# Run it in WSL terminal
free -h --giga # Check total memory

Commands to release disk space back

After using WSL for a while you might find that your hard disk is full and WSL uses most capacity. This is because WSL2 will not automatically release used disk space so we have to do it manually.

There are two options to release the disk space used by WSL.

compact option in diskpart

This option uses the compact command in diskpart to release the disk space. Please remember to change the filepath accordingly.

# Run them in Windows terminal
wsl --shutdown
diskpart # Will open window Diskpart

# Then run them in the opened Diskpart window
select vdisk file="C:\Users\<your-user-name>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu20.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx"
attach vdisk readonly
compact vdisk
detach vdisk
exit

optimize-vhd

The command optimize-vhd is only available in Windows 10 Pro with Hyper-v feature installed.

cd C:\Users\<your-user-name>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu20.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState
wsl --shutdown
optimize-vhd -Path .\ext4.vhdx -Mode full

After the installation of WSL, you can do many things like in Linux. Here are a few examples:

  • Install other applications such as Docker, Azure CLI etc.
  • Setup crontab to run scheduled tasks.
  • Files can be copied between Windows and WSL as well. For example, copy a file from C:/test/data.csv to your current folder you can run cp /mnt/c/test/data.csv ./data.csv.
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