Microsoft Releases WSL 2.6 As The First Open-Source Release

Written by Michael Larabel in Microsoft on 20 June 2025 at 06:22 AM EDT. 46 Comments

Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project.

The WSL2 source code has been public since their Build 2025 announcement but today marks the first new feature release under the open-source flag. Microsoft open-sourced WSL in hoping to spur more community growth around it and making it easier in tracking down bugs and contributing to the project.

👁 WSL with Ubuntu Linux on Windows 11

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 is their first open-source release while also bringing stability improvements and a variety of bug fixes and other enhancements.

- First open source release of WSL
- Various stability improvements
- Update localized strings
- Don't throw when unregistering a distro that has a BasePath that doesn't exist
- Fix distribution download failing if the URL contains parameters
- Fix various issues with systemd user sessions
- Fix wslsettings crash when invoked from wslservice
- Set MOVEFILE_WRITE_THROUGH when moving distribution VHD's
- Discard BOM header when parsing the Windows 'hosts' file
- Correctly report corrupted disks when mount() fails with EUCLEAN
- Don't use a ? prefix when resolving the distribution location
- Solve potential failure while downloading a distribution if LastError is non zero

Downloads and more details on the MIT-licensed WSL 2.6.0 release via GitHub.