WSL Manager

gballan 88 points 48 comments March 08, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

wongarsu

The ability to run docker containers as wsl instances looks nifty. A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container, but you get the ability to start a shell with Windows terminal or access files with Explorer (and thus every program running in Windows)

lukax

Looks nice but still a bit sad that Flutter is used instead of something native given that they don't need the app to be cross-platform. Well, even Microsoft uses React Native for a lot of Windows-only apps.

behnamoh

I wish it was a TUI. Windows is a plague I try to stay away from as much as possible, and it already gives me headaches to setup WSL and manage them over ssh. Some things you just can't do w/o remote desktop... And sometimes WSL crashes and there's literally no way to recover except to restart the whole machine. The only reason I use Windows is because Nvidia drivers are easier to setup. But once I'm inside my Fedora WSL, that feels like home, not the Windows host.

shmerl

Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.

skhameneh

This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows. No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompatibility.

llm_nerd

Neat project. Merging the layers of a docker image and setting that as a WSL filesystem is a nice convenience. I recently realized that 100% of what I use Windows for was as a WSL2 foundation: It had been reduced to being an extremely overbearing and heavyweight host machine for a Linux VM. Nothing in my life was Windows-only anymore, and it was basically just inertia that I even still had it installed. I'd been a "Windows guy" for decades, had decades of Windows software dev under my belt, even got my MCSE, MCDBA, along with other Microsoft certs, and even wrote for MSDN Magazine. No longer did it have any leverage on my profession at all, which was shocking to me. The next day I purged Windows from my two main working machines, so now I'm pure Linux and macOS. A few weeks later and I can say it has been a marvelous transition, and cuts out the no longer relevant middleman.

tonymet

this is great and I have a feature request: A "refresh VM" feature that exports your home dir + packages into a new VM instance. I've tried Optimize-VHD but renewing the VM this way frees up disk and speeds up the VM as well. None of the WSL settings for sparse disk / disk shrinking seem to work well. Here's what I usually do $ tar -czf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz $HOME $ apt list --installed > /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process. $ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME $ apt update $ cat /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt | xargs apt install

herf

I wish there were more ways to specify whether the Windows filesystem /mnt/c should be mounted in a WSL2 instance - it is kind of generally on or off. In cases where I want WSL2 to function as a "container" isolated from my desktop, I use a different Windows user just in case.

admiralrohan

My WSL Ubuntu instance always gets disconnected after I come out of sleep or hibernation mode. Anyone else faced this issue and any solutions? I have tried everything found online.

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