Arch Linux WSL is now official!

Windows Subsystem for Linux was released on August 2nd, 2016, for Windows 10 systems. Since then, WSL 2 was released on 2019 to bring more improvements, including GUI support for Linux desktop applications. It initially only supported Ubuntu, but we’ve seen more and more distributions support WSL.

One of the Linux distributions that supports WSL is Arch Linux, which has been recently made official. You can find instructions on how to install Arch Linux on WSL in the below button:

This allows Windows users to try out Arch Linux using the Windows Subsystem for Linux feature. Please note that you must have WSL version 2.x installed, because Arch Linux doesn’t support WSL 1.x.

The Arch Linux team recommends that, once you install Arch Linux WSL, you’ll have to run the Pacman database synchronization using the pacman -Sy command. Optionally, you’ll have to install all available upgrades using the pacman -Syu command.

By default, you’ll get a default root account, so you may have to configure your Arch Linux WSL to create a new user to ensure that you have better experience. After installing Arch and updating the packages, follow the below steps to create a user account:

1. Open Arch Linux WSL
2. Use the useradd command to add a user
   • For example, if you want a user account called tux, use useradd tux
3. Use the groupmod command to add a wheel group for sudo and to add yourself to the group
   • Execute groupadd wheel
   • Execute groupmod -U tux -a wheel
   • Optionally, ensure that your user gets added to the wheel group using the groups tux command.
4. Install sudo and allow users under the wheel group to execute sudo
   • Execute pacman -Sy sudo vim
   • Execute visudo (recommended) or vim /etc/sudoers (not recommended)
   • Find the # %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL line (usually line 125) and uncomment it by removing the hashtag character, then save the changes using the :w! command.
5. Create the home directory for your user and correct its ownership
   • Execute mkdir /home/tux
   • Execute chown -R tux:tux /home/tux
6. Exit the current WSL session and change the default user for the archlinux distribution
   • Refer to this documentation for more information (there are more methods documented here)
   • If you’re using WSL 2.4.10 or later, use the wsl --manage <distro> --set-default-user <username> command. For example, use wsl --manage archlinux --set-default-user tux.
7. Re-open the Arch Linux WSL distribution and verify that your user account is used instead of the root account.