v2.4.1

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. This release lists what changed since 2.3.0.

Your instances

• Backup and restore (new): back every instance up to a folder of your choice and restore them from it again, one at a time or all together.
• WSL 1 or WSL 2 (new): see which version each installed distro runs on and switch it over, without leaving the app.
• Create from a local Docker image (new): pick an image already on your machine and turn it into a WSL instance.
• Default user (new): set the account a plain wsl opens, when you create an instance or later in its settings.
• Copy files between instances (new): pick files and folders in one instance and drop them into another.

Windows Terminal

• Every instance now shows up in the Windows Terminal dropdown, each with its own profile, and the app keeps that list in step as you add and remove instances.
• Opening an instance uses its profile, so it starts with the colours, font and starting directory you set for it.

Windows on ARM

• There is now a native Arm64 build — installer, portable ZIP and MSIX. On an ARM machine it runs without emulation instead of the x64 build.
• The root filesystems offered when you create an instance now match your machine's processor, so an ARM device is offered ARM images.

Networking

• Hosts file entries (new, optional): running instances can be kept in your Windows hosts file, so you can reach them by name instead of by a changing IP. Turn it on in Settings.

macOS VMs

• Installing a VM now reports each step as it happens, instead of a single long wait.
• A stopped VM's CPU count, memory and disk size can be changed from its menu.
• The app signs in as the account the VM actually has, rather than assuming a fixed one.

AI and snippets

• The AI features now ask once, clearly, before they are switched on. Nothing reaches an AI service until you say yes.
• The assistant chat has a resizable dock, a multi-line input box, and keeps your earlier conversations so you can pick one up again.
• Snippets that declare values now ask you for them before they run, instead of failing part-way through.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager. On Windows on ARM, pick the arm64 installer or ZIP.

Full Changelog: v2.3.0...v2.4.1

v2.4.0

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. This release lists what changed since 2.3.0.

Your instances

• Backup and restore (new): back every instance up to a folder of your choice and restore them from it again, one at a time or all together.
• WSL 1 or WSL 2 (new): see which version each installed distro runs on and switch it over, without leaving the app.
• Create from a local Docker image (new): pick an image already on your machine and turn it into a WSL instance.
• Default user (new): set the account a plain wsl opens, when you create an instance or later in its settings.
• Copy files between instances (new): pick files and folders in one instance and drop them into another.

Windows Terminal

• Every instance now shows up in the Windows Terminal dropdown, each with its own profile, and the app keeps that list in step as you add and remove instances.
• Opening an instance uses its profile, so it starts with the colours, font and starting directory you set for it.

Windows on ARM

• There is now a native Arm64 build — installer, portable ZIP and MSIX. On an ARM machine it runs without emulation instead of the x64 build.
• The root filesystems offered when you create an instance now match your machine's processor, so an ARM device is offered ARM images.

Networking

• Hosts file entries (new, optional): running instances can be kept in your Windows hosts file, so you can reach them by name instead of by a changing IP. Turn it on in Settings.

macOS VMs

• Installing a VM now reports each step as it happens, instead of a single long wait.
• A stopped VM's CPU count, memory and disk size can be changed from its menu.
• The app signs in as the account the VM actually has, rather than assuming a fixed one.

AI and snippets

• The AI features now ask once, clearly, before they are switched on. Nothing reaches an AI service until you say yes.
• The assistant chat has a resizable dock, a multi-line input box, and keeps your earlier conversations so you can pick one up again.
• Snippets that declare values now ask you for them before they run, instead of failing part-way through.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager. On Windows on ARM, pick the arm64 installer or ZIP.

Full Changelog: v2.3.0...v2.4.0

v2.3.0

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. This release lists what changed since 2.2.0.

Experimental features, opt in

• Settings has a new Experimental features section. Containers, Kubernetes, Cloud, cloud-init and Playbooks are off until you switch them on there; a switch takes effect at once, in the navigation, in Settings and in the assistant's tools.
• cloud-init (new): write cloud-init configurations and seed new macOS VMs and WSL imports with them.
• Playbooks (new): describe an instance's state as code and apply it to existing instances.

AI

• Pro users can turn the AI features off entirely under Settings — the assistant, the diagnosis and the AI Workspace.
• The web dashboard now carries the AI assistant chat.
• Every AI Workspace tool is set up with the assistant's endpoint, key and model, and the tool cards no longer overflow on narrow windows.
• Each assistant run that changes an instance is saved as a snippet.

Fixed and improved

• Host folders can be shared into WSL distros, Apple VMs and the AI Workspace.
• macOS: file pickers open again.
• A copy bought in the Microsoft Store keeps Pro from the acquisition date the Store reports.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager.

Full Changelog: v2.2.0...v2.3.0

v2.2.0

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. This release lists what changed since 2.1.0.

Licence screen

• On Windows, Pro is now offered through wslmanager.com with a licence key, the same way as on the Mac. A copy bought in the Microsoft Store keeps Pro; if yours ever shows Free, use Check again or the Get help link on that screen.
• The screen reports anonymous page views and buy-button clicks to Plausible, so we can tell whether it works. No licence keys, email addresses or identifiers are ever sent.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager.

Full Changelog: v2.1.0...v2.2.0

WSL Manager 2.1.0

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. Everything described there still applies; this release lists what changed since 2.0.4.

Configure your AI tools from the app (Pro, beta)

Every AI Workspace card now has a Configure button. It opens a settings form built at runtime from whatever the installed tool says about its own configuration — there is no hand-maintained list of options in the app, so a tool that gains a setting shows it the next time you open the dialog.

• OpenCode and OpenClaw describe themselves with a real JSON Schema (187 and roughly 2 000 settings), so you get their actual options — toggles, dropdowns for enumerated values, numbers and text — behind a search box and collapsed sections instead of a wall of fields.
• A tool that publishes no schema gets a form inferred from the settings its config file already holds, and one with no config file yet says so rather than inventing keys.
• Open WebUI is shown read-only: it is configured through the environment its container was created with, and re-creating that container to change a variable would delete everything stored in it.
• Only what you actually edit is written back. Keys the form never rendered, comments it never parsed and credentials it never read are left exactly as they were — tokens, secrets and API keys are stripped before the document reaches the screen, so an untouched one is never part of the write.
• Clearing a field removes the setting instead of writing an empty value, and OpenClaw's write goes through its own config patch, so its file stays validated by the tool itself.

macOS: VM terminals tell you where you landed

Opening a terminal on a Linux VM now greets you with fastfetch. The banner is installed inside the guest as a profile snippet, so every way in shows it — the terminal button, the serial console, and the VM's own login prompt in the display window. If fastfetch is not there, the guest fetches it once through its own package manager; until then you get neofetch, or a short uname/uptime summary, so a terminal never leaves you guessing which machine it is.

Interactive shells only, once per session, and there is a VM terminal greeting toggle under Settings → General if you would rather have a bare prompt.

Fixed

• macOS: AI Workspace dashboards open. The dashboard button handed the browser localhost on the Mac — an address a Linux VM does not share — so it reported the dashboard as unreachable however healthy the tool was. Each dashboard port is now forwarded over the SSH connection the app already holds, from the guest's loopback to your Mac's: reused while a dashboard is open, replaced if it dies, and taken down with the app. Windows is unaffected, where WSL shares loopback with the host already.
• macOS: OpenClaw starts. Start no longer tries to restart a service unit that was never created, sets the gateway mode the current version refuses to start without, and persists a token so its Control UI can actually find one. Authentication you had already configured is left alone.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager.

Full Changelog: v2.0.4...v2.1.0

v2.0.4

This is an automated release.

Full Changelog: v2.0.3...v2.0.4

WSL Manager 2.0.3

A small follow-up to 2.0.2. For the full picture of what this generation of
WSL Manager brings, see the 2.0.0 release notes
— everything described there still applies.

Community scripts open quickly again

Opening Community scripts used to make eighty-one separate requests before
the first row appeared, and it spent the anonymous GitHub rate limit that
everyone behind your address shares. It is now a single cached request.

The same change repairs distro download URLs, which had quietly been frozen on
whatever shipped with your build rather than picking up new ones.

Fixes

• macOS: Homebrew installs no longer fail with "Cask reports different
  checksum" when a release is rebuilt after publishing.
• The Windows package now advertises Korean, so the Store offers it alongside
  the other languages the app already ships.

WSL Manager 2.0.2

New here? The 2.0.0 release notes carry the full picture — what WSL Manager 2 is, every feature, the download table and how Pro works. This release only lists what changed since 2.0.1.

Fixed

macOS VMs: you can actually log in now

• Every Linux VM gets a login password, and a new Login details button on the VM's row shows the account, the password (masked until revealed, one click to copy) and the SSH key. Before, a VM created from a cloud image with a custom user had no password at all, so the login prompt on its own screen could not be answered by anyone.
• Your own ~/.ssh key is authorized in every Linux VM (created for you if you have none), so a plain ssh user@<vm-ip> from your own Terminal just works.
• The terminal button on a running VM opens an SSH shell as the VM's user — no login prompt, no password — and falls back to the serial console when the guest can't be reached by key.
• Fixed the shell that button opens coming up dead: the SSH session was never the Terminal window's foreground job and stopped on its first read of the tty. It now is.
• VMs created before this release pick up a password the first time you open Login details; it applies on the VM's next boot, and the dialog tells you so.

Other

• The hosting-interface probe behind the web dashboard's share links is built the same way on every Flutter the project supports.

Added

• AI Workspace: OpenCode is available as a fourth tool, next to Hermes Agent, OpenClaw and Open WebUI.
• Sandboxed AI on macOS: throwaway sandboxes are created as native VMs on the Apple backend, the way they are as distros on Windows.

Downloads

Same as 2.0.0: Microsoft Store (recommended on Windows), the -setup.exe or portable .zip below, winget install Bostrot.WSLManager, and on Apple silicon the .dmg or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager.

WSL Manager 2.0.1

A point release on top of 2.0.0 — mainly a macOS crash fix. Nothing here changes what 2.0 is; read the 2.0.0 notes for macOS VMs, the AI layer, remote WSL and the UI audit.

Downloads

Platform	Get it
Windows (recommended)	Microsoft Store — Pro is a one-time purchase there
Windows, no Store	wsl2-distro-manager-v2.0.1-setup.exe (installer), or the portable .zip below, or winget install Bostrot.WSLManager
macOS (Apple silicon, beta)	wsl2-distro-manager-v2.0.1-macos.dmg, or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager

Fixed

• macOS: opening Settings could quit the app. The window plugin traps in native code the moment it is asked about a window it was never handed — no error, the process just goes. Every window call the app makes now hands it one first, and the Flutter view is put in place before plugins are registered rather than swapped out from under them afterwards.
• Alpine VMs buried the login prompt under can't open /dev/ttyAMA0. Alpine's cloud images keep a getty on a UART that Virtualization.framework does not have, so init respawned it forever. The console now runs on hvc0, where the serial port actually is. Existing VMs pick this up with vmctl reseed.
• The BETA pill's label is centred, and the pill is the same size as the NEW one beside it in the pane.

Also in this release

• The direct builds update themselves. The installer .exe, the portable .zip and the macOS downloads no longer sit at whatever version they were installed at behind a link to this page. Store installs are untouched — the Store keeps those current.
• Pro can be bought without the Microsoft Store on Windows. A licence key from wslmanager.com/buy now works on Windows too, at the same US$ 14.99, alongside the Store listing. macOS already worked this way.
• The Create screens for distros and VMs are grouped into titled cards instead of one flat column of controls.
• Distro packages is marked as beta in the navigation pane — .wsl packaging is as new as the AI Workspace, and it writes a distribution config and exports several gigabytes.

Full Changelog: v2.0.0...v2.0.1

macOS builds replaced on 2026-09-07. The original 2.0.1 dmg/zip could quit the moment Settings opened (a closed analytics connection raised SIGPIPE, which the app now ignores). Same version, new checksum; re-download or brew upgrade if you got them before that date.

WSL Manager 2.0.0

WSL Manager 2.0 is the biggest release since the app was written: it runs on macOS now, it gained an AI layer (an isolated agent workspace, a chat that knows your setup, and an MCP server so your own tools can drive it), it can manage a remote Windows host's WSL over SSH, and every screen went through a full UI/UX audit.

Downloads

Platform	Get it
Windows (recommended)	Microsoft Store — Pro is a one-time purchase there
Windows, no Store	wsl2-distro-manager-v2.0.0-setup.exe (installer), or the portable .zip below, or winget install Bostrot.WSLManager
macOS (Apple silicon, beta)	wsl2-distro-manager-v2.0.0-macos.dmg (signed and notarized), or brew install --cask bostrot/tap/wsl-manager

Pro unlocks the AI features: a one-time purchase in the Microsoft Store, or a licence key from wslmanager.com/buy for macOS and non-Store installs. No subscription, free updates.

Why a paid tier at all? WSL Manager has been a one-person, spare-time project since 2021. Managing your distros and VMs stays free and open source; Pro is the AI layer on top, and it is what turns the time spent on this app into planned, regular work on the next releases, free features included.

New in 2.0

macOS: native Linux VMs (beta)

• The app now runs on Apple silicon Macs and manages native Linux VMs through Apple's Virtualization framework, with the same list, start/stop, import/export, copy and snippet flows as WSL distros.
• Create VM page with a curated catalogue: Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine and eight more arm64 cloud images boot straight into a ready-to-use VM (qcow2 images are converted on the fly), plus an installer-ISO catalogue for everything else. A boot source is required, so no more unbootable VMs.
• Rows show the guest IP and real disk usage; Finder opens the VM's actual disk (and the app refuses to start a VM whose disk is still mounted).
• Show-screen button to summon a VM's display on demand, and an attachable serial console to drive a VM without a window.
• The app installs its SSH key into VMs that cloud-init never seeded, and explains a VM that stops right after starting.
• Native window controls, one title bar, and a wslmanager:// deep link that activates Pro straight from the browser after checkout.

AI Workspace, AI Chat and the MCP server (Pro, beta)

• AI Workspace: guided one-click setup of a dedicated Linux VM (or WSL distro) running Hermes Agent, OpenClaw and Open WebUI, with a full lifecycle (install, start, stop, uninstall, repair), streamed install progress, honest status probes and a task queue for agent jobs.
• AI Chat docked in the shell: bring your own API key (any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works), model autocomplete, live streamed replies with tool-call assembly, a code copy button, persistent sessions, failed messages kept with a retry, and long operations that can actually be stopped.
• AI Configuration Assistant and Error Diagnosis for WSL problems.
• Built-in MCP server with terminal sessions, so external agents can drive your distros and VMs; optional Cloudflare tunnel and a shareable web dashboard with QR code.
• One-click service recipes (storage, databases, brokers) for a distro or VM.

Remote WSL over SSH

• Drive a remote Windows host's WSL from the app — including from the Mac — with target validation, quoting that survives every Windows login shell, VHDX compaction on cleanup, and storage-path handling for remote distros.

Snippets and community scripts

• Snippets get a proper editor and sharing to the community repository through GitHub sign-in (the OAuth client id is bundled).
• Community scripts are a screen of their own with filters, and the Snippets tab is shared with the macOS backend.

Distros, packaging and configuration

• Distro packages replace templates: custom-distro packaging with wsl-distribution.conf, and a dedicated Ubuntu distro for the workspace.
• A rewritten .wslconfig engine with --manage surfaces, a rewritten wsl.conf editor, serialised config writes, and catalogue installs that work on every distro family.
• The distro catalogue is sourced from vendor infrastructure again, with a bundled fallback.
• Linux builds of the app.

Look, feel and accessibility

• A full UI/UX audit (214 findings closed): one dialog contract for buttons, titles and sizes; destructive actions that look and behave destructive; primary buttons that never silently do nothing; every icon-only control named; the whole app operable by keyboard; a status bar with severity and lifetime; error messages that say what failed and what to do; and no more discarded input on the way out of a form.
• Redesigned About dialog, a sparkle-pill AI chat button, a curated dark/light theme resolved entirely from the theme, and page navigation that replaces instead of stacking.
• Ten locales now ship, including the new Korean translation and es/hu/ja in the MSIX package, with a translation check in CI.

Fixes worth knowing about

• WinGet installs start correctly through winget's symlink (the app relaunches the real executable).
• Timed-out or force-killed child processes no longer leak wsl.exe; child processes are tied to a job object.
• WSL output is decoded as UTF-16LE, so non-ASCII output is readable.
• Tool commands run inside WSL instead of a non-existent bash on Windows.
• One failed list poll no longer wipes the distro list; deleting a template whose file is gone is tolerated.
• Open WebUI reports "starting" until it is actually healthy; gateway status is gated on the port, not the process.
• Dozens of bug reports from the issue tracker addressed; broken locales and unreadable copy repaired.

Full commit list: v1.11.0...v2.0.0

Contributors

• Korean translation by @moduvoice (#316), Chinese README by @Jesse205 (#306). Thank you!