Forwarding Allan's mail at his request, and answering it :) On 1/28/25 9:23 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
Hi Robin,
Hi Allan,
Can you forward this to arch-dev-public? I am not subscribed.
I have been using Arch almost exclusively in WSL for the past months. My Arch machine died and I have not replaced it yet, so WSL on the work laptop is what I have to work with. All pacman development currently happens on WSL!
It does bring its own set of problems, so we would need to have a clear support policy of what is an Arch issue, and what is a WSL issue. Often that is not clear!
Things I have noted:
1) Importing from the docker image is good, but it strips a lot of files (i.e. all documentation). It took me ages to work out why there was no man pages! I do not think a WSL install should do that.
I guess we could install `man-db` as part of the "first setup" script.
2) Logging in a root, setting up the user, the re-logging is not much of a barrier to using Arch, so I do not think we need to automatically set that up.
Sure, that was just to illustrate how distributions usually use the automatic "first setup" script but we can use it the way we want of course.
3) I do not enable systemd boot. I'm not sure what that causes me to miss, but it does result in some errors on pacman upgrades from hooks, so enabling is likely a sane default.
This is about enabling systemd support within your WSL distro, allowing to enable / start services via systemctl. Pretty handy!
4) I use WSL version: 2.3.26.0. I'm not sure why your notes say to use a pre-release version
Version >= 2.4.4 brings support for "click-to-install" and automatic "first setup" script execution, which greatly simplify and improve the "installation" user experience (hence why I mentioned it). But this is not mandatory, such a tarball would still be pretty straightforward to install and use with WSL < 2.4.4. A single PowerShell command is enough to install and the "first setup" script would need to be launched "manually" at the first run, that's all.
As an example of a WSL specific bug, I battled for days with xfce4- terminal settings. Any settings done in the settings manager are not saved. I could not even get them to work by manually editing config files in ~/.config/.... I work around this by having my taskbar launcher point to:
"C:\Program Files\WSL\wslg.exe" -d arch --cd "~" -- xfce4-terminal -- font="Bitsream Vera Sans Mono 15"
This may be due to lack of systemd boot (and thus dbus?).
Also, getting click-through of hyperlinks from the terminal to a (Windows) system browser was a pain. I need a symlink ~/bin/firefox to '/mnt/c/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe' and a custom ~/.local/share/xfce4/helpers/custom-WebBrowser.desktop file. Even then, I needed xfce4-settings installed for this to be recognised (even though changing settings there does nothing!).
Ah, right. Thanks for bringing those up. I am myself only using WSL inside the default "terminal" environment and I personally do not export X11 or using any graphical environment / apps with it. So those are eventual issues I never had to deal with. But that's a fair point. While I said in my earlier answer to George that I don't expect much WSL specific issues nowadays, exporting / using graphical apps could indeed bring its own fair share of potential issues. Although, I guess most of them would not be Arch specific and probably `wslg` (upstream) related?
I have been keeping notes about my setup here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/allan/wsl
Thanks for the share!
My conclusion is, WSL is definitely a useful tool, but brings its own issues. Do we have the people-power or community to support it?
That's basically what I'm looking for with this proposal. Maintaining the image itself would probably be a low effort but, indeed, gathering interest from some people (community included) around supporting it would be a prerequisite. As I said to George in my response as well, I'm personally fine if we only officially provide low / limited support for it though, at least at first.
Cheers, Allan
Thanks for sharing good insight! -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz