WSL recommended distribution?
Misc.
Hello guys,
I want to install WSL on my Windows machine, and I wonder about the distribution I should go with.
Ubuntu is the default one, but I have read some bad things about them with their snaps etc., and I’ve also decided moving to Linux Mint on my Linux machine.
So which distribution do you recommend for WSL? Are the snaps even there in Ubuntu for WSL as well?
Thanks in advance.
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I use Debian, it has long term stability and is upstream of Ubuntu and Mint so it's pretty similar without pushing stuff like Snap.
I'll add: Debian WSL is tighter and you are starting with less bloat.
A little more work after install with Debian and you have the distro you want.
Ubuntu might be the only distro that takes WSL seriously. They even maintain several packages made only for WSL. Other distros merely create a base root file system with selected packages pre-installed.
I would also imagine that there are more WSL-ubuntu users, so issues likely get reported and fixed quicker.
If you install ubuntu from wsl.exe, the snapd is pre-installed. If you don't like it, simply remove it.
Ubuntu has the best out of the box support and compatibility. This is the distribution that WSL seems to be developing against. Things like gpu acceleration are mostly documented here.
Personally I use Fedora at home and RHEL at work with WSL2. I have scripts for both that use podman to build a container recipe and export the resulting image to a WSL compatible tarball. For fedora this is easy and only gets difficult if you want GPU accelerated GUI apps. On RHEL I build the base tarball using UBI then after deployment use the satellite curl based onboarding to upgrade to full RHEL. Combine all this with WSL's new mirror network mode and everything has been smooth sailing.
Have you tried RH's prebuilt WSL2 distro?
I went with Debian. Liking it. I've mostly used nothing but Ubuntu MATE in recent years but I started feeling concerned about all the drama and baggage (Ubuntu Pro, increasing reliance on snap) and since Ubuntu is based on Debian it's like 95% the same so everything is still pretty familiar.
I have Debian because it's the one with which I'm most familiar. Recently added openSUSE Tumbleweed to play around with since I'm unfamiliar with it.
I've been using Debian for a long time and am pretty happy with it. Not sure why Ubuntu will be better, since it's already WSL2 why not go to the source. Ubuntu is leaning into the proprietary direction, Debian is the base.
I use Debian. Be sure to checkout WSL config. For example my dev env was messed up because per default WSL appends the Windows path so it ran native Windows python.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config