wsl

A scoop bucket of installers for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Make absolutely certain to enable the WSL feature first, like so:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Install scoop like this:

iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')

Then install this software bucket like this:

scoop bucket add wsl https://github.com/KNOXDEV/wsl

Now you can quickly and automatically install the software registered here. No Windows Store necessary. For example, to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, just use:

scoop install wsl-ubuntu2004

For a full list of current supported distros, check the bucket, or just run:

scoop search wsl-

That's it! The software in this bucket should not be considered stable and may not install successfully while its a Work In Progress.

notes

• I decided to not add hashes to the manifest due to a lack of consistent versioning information. It's unclear if Microsoft will push in-place upgrades of the distro download links I'm using, but that is what I suspect, in which case the hashes do more harm than good. The installers themselves have built-in integrity checks, so I'm not too concerned about it.

• Whichever distro you install first will be your default from then on out. Your default distro is the one that opens when you Right Click > Open Linux shell here or use wsl.exe from the command line. You can reset your default by using wslconfig.

• Uninstalling a distro and reinstalling it with scoop will DELETE everything stored in that distros filesystem and set it back to scratch. This includes if you UPDATE the distro via scoop, although I have no plans to publish updates to existing distro manifests since you can just update them with a package manager.

• Yes, this works on Windows 10 LTSC :)

• ~~Yes, there are distros I haven't added yet. Feel free to add them or make changes.~~ I actually don't know of any distros I'm missing anymore. Create a pull request or issue to suggest an addition to the repo.