[meddlepal]

You can boot the WSL vm with systemd but it requires some fiddling.

That said, I've been playing around more and more with WSL2 on a secondary machine as a current primary Fedora user (for about 10 years now) and I really haven't found a good reason why I would need systemd in the WSL2 VM vs the custom init.

[aseipp]

A major use case I have for WSL2 requires systemd, full stop (it's critical for the package manager I use.) It's pretty painful not having it available, and this is really something that needs improvement IMO. To be fair, this could be fixed in the software too (to some extent, not fully but working) which would also be a solution. But I suspect this isn't the only problem people encounter. There's a lot people use modern Linux for.

In practice that hasn't been a roadblock for me, because VMWare Workstation 15.5 finally supports running on top of Hyper-V, so I can have both working at once. Moving everything to a single hypervisor API has some nice benefits...

[strictfp]

One possible solution to this is removing systemd from all distros. That way you won't need it for your package manager anymore.

[vetinari]

Yeah, and let's continue with removing Win32 from Windows. That way other folks do not need to bother with Wine anymore.

/s, obviously.

[stephenr]

A more realistic option is to abandon WSL as yet more crap from Microsoft.

[aseipp]

Please take the crybaby shit to Slashdot or something, man. It's not a good look.

[vetinari]

It is like Excel - most people use at most 20% of the functionality, but any competitor that implements only 20% is not usable.

Most WSL2 users use it as shell to run occasional ELF/x64 binary that runs in console; for services, they would use Docker Desktop for Windows. Anything beyond that and you will quickly find out, that it is not really a standard linux distribution.