Why is it allowed to delete the WSL distribution on vscode?

[PatrickZhao12]

Type: Bug

Why is it allowed to delete the WSL distribution on vscode? When I couldn't connect to WSL through vscode, I accidentally clicked the "Delete distro" button, which caused the deletion of the WSL image and had a great impact on my work. I was very angry. vscode should not provide such a dangerous operation on a plug-in. It is really stupid.

Extension version: 0.88.5 VS Code version: Code 1.97.2 (e54c774e0add60467559eb0d1e229c6452cf8447, 2025-02-12T23:20:35.343Z) OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631 Modes:

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz (8 x 2803)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled canvas_oop_rasterization: enabled_on direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok skia_graphite: disabled_off video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled vulkan: disabled_off webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled webnn: disabled_off
Load (avg)	undefined
Memory (System)	15.71GB (6.37GB free)
Process Argv	--crash-reporter-id 2458fd61-fa41-408e-a00c-7e707273686e
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

A/B Experiments

vsliv368:30146709
vspor879:30202332
vspor708:30202333
vspor363:30204092
vscod805:30301674
binariesv615:30325510
py29gd2263:31024239
c4g48928:30535728
azure-dev_surveyone:30548225
2i9eh265:30646982
962ge761:30959799
h48ei257:31000450
pythontbext0:30879054
cppperfnew:31000557
dwnewjupyter:31046869
nativerepl2:31139839
pythonrstrctxt:31112756
nativeloc2:31192216
iacca1:31171482
5fd0e150:31155592
dwcopilot:31170013
stablechunks:31184530
6074i472:31201624
dwoutputs:31238123
customenabled:31237564
9064b325:31222308
copilot_t_ci:31222730
jda6j935:31233686
g941i948:31240199

[aeschli]

I'm sorry to hear that. There is a dialog that emphasizes that all data is lost...

[peter-yu]

I was doing the same thing, and then the wsl instance was reset to initial state. I upgraded ubuntnu from 18.0.4 (lts) to 20.0.4 (for old libc issue), but another "copilot chat" extension could not compatible anymore. I thought this was wsl registery issue, and wanted to reset the vscode wsl resitery, but the whole wsl instance was reset sadly..

[aeschli]

There is an dialog that explicitly asks for confirmation: Are you sure you want to permanently delete the distro Ubuntu including all its data?

[vs-code-engineering[bot]]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 10 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!