WSL2 Distro Manager 1.10.0 released
A major update has been released for WSL2 Distro Manager, bringing its version number to 1.10.0. This free and open-source application provides a user-friendly graphical interface for managing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distributions.
WSL2 Distro Manager helps manage your Windows Subsystem for Linux setups through a straightforward graphical interface. It’s free and open source, which means you can look at how it works or contribute if you fancy tinkering, though that's probably way beyond most users' goals right now!
This tool aims to simplify things. Installing, uninstalling, and updating distros is all handled with the click of a button. You can even launch them directly from here. Beyond basic management, there are extra features designed to improve your WSL experience, like sharing distro profiles between machines or setting up quick actions for common tasks.
So what’s actually helpful here? Well, it makes managing multiple distributions easier than dealing with command line prompts alone. Whether you're just getting started with WSL or diving deep into its capabilities, this app can be genuinely useful because it bundles together quite a few powerful features without needing complex setup. It helps wrangle all those Linux instances on Windows so they work smoothly.
Let's dig deeper into what the software offers now. You can manage your WSL instances easily enough. There are tools for downloading Docker images directly as WSL distros, which is handy if you don't want to run full-blown Docker Desktop just yet. Quick Actions let you execute scripts directly within a running instance, perfect for fast configuration changes or routine operations.
Need even more? The software supports using Turnkey Linux images or other LXC containers, too. These can help set up fully virtualized environments relatively quickly. And version 1.10.0 specifically adds support for importing VHDX files as distros directly into WSL, plus better compatibility with Turnkey sources and smoother integration with Windows Terminal, which is always welcome.
The update also includes some quality-of-life tweaks. You can now set preferences related to backups or restores right within the app initialization instead of hunting through config files elsewhere. Managing paths across different setups became easier by using a central data location setting. The team also fixed things up for move operations that might get interrupted and improved feedback during cleanup tasks.
On the UI side, they refactored theme handling slightly behind the scenes, added some tooltip settings if you like those tooltips, and swapped out one specific control (Expander) for another simpler one (InfoLabel). No big changes there necessarily, just a bit cleaner underneath.
Bug fixes are always welcome too. This update fixed an issue with assigning registry URLs related to Docker images and made the export validation process more reliable by comparing it against the original VHDX size beforehand.
Users can download the latest version of WSL2 Distro Manager from its GitHub page below, which provides access to this powerful tool for managing their Windows Subsystem for Linux distributions.
Release wsl2-distro-manager v1.10.0
This is an automated release. Features Add VHDX import support (closes #183) Add support for Turnkey Linux source type in create dialog
