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Your shell prompt, ls output, or a TUI app shows the wrong colors, garbled characters, or no colors at all specifically inside Windows Terminal connected to WSL — even though the exact same shell config looks fine over plain SSH.
A complete walkthrough setting up Windows Terminal specifically for a smooth WSL experience — default profile, font, and the settings that most commonly need adjusting.
Before WSL let Windows run real Linux binaries, Microsoft tried and abandoned a different compatibility project entirely. Here's the actual path from that cancellation to today's tightly-integrated WSL2.
A complete walkthrough getting WSL2 and a Linux distro running from a clean Windows installation — the single-command path, and what to check if it doesn't work cleanly the first time.
A complete walkthrough running several separate Linux distros side by side under WSL — installing additional distros, switching between them, and setting a specific one as your default.
Eighteen months after its first public reveal, WSL stopped being an experimental preview feature — gaining full Microsoft support, multi-distro installs via the Microsoft Store, and Windows Server compatibility.
For years, setting up WSL meant enabling Windows features manually, downloading a kernel update package separately, and installing a distro as separate steps. The wsl --install command collapsed all of it into one line.
WSL dropped its 'Preview' label in the Microsoft Store on November 22, 2022, decoupling its update cycle from Windows itself entirely — meaning WSL improvements could ship on their own schedule going forward.