please change your mind and allow wsl to stay running in background even if all windows are closed / minimized

[somethingstarted]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
i have functions that i would like to be able to run or ssh into but i cant. i have to RM into the computer to open up wsl and do it that way.

Describe the solution you'd like
if wsl was allowed to natively run as soon as the computer booted, and stay running, unless explicitly shutdown or disabled - it would help so many people.

Describe alternatives you've considered
only other alternative is getting a whole other computer just for linux, or ditching windows altogether.

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Open similar issues:

• wsl doesn't keep running in background after closing window (#9401), similarity score: 0.83

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[benhillis]

This is a good suggestion. Keeping the VM alive is already mostly possible via a .wslconfig option.

[wsl2]
vmIdleTimeout=-1

It doens't look like distro idle detection is configurable, let me take a look at that.

[biggestsonicfan]

@benhillis Distro detection would be invaluable as I mount a btrfs partition for deduplicating datasets of files added in Windows. I didn't have this problem for some reason until I recently redid my openSUSE-TW distro, as it seemingly did not shut down, but now it is, which causes issues when files are trying to be added to the now non-existent path.

[pcause]

i have set VM idle to -1. which is supposed to me don't kill the VM, on the latest pre-release 2.3.11 and that doesn't seem to have any impact and the WSL instance gets killed anyway.

[james-world]

• VM != distro instance. We really need a distro-level setting to prevent / configure shutdown on idle and using filthy hacks to avoid it. The use-case of using a VM to host docker engine is one incredibly useful feature for those of us in corporate environments without docker desktop that would benefit from this.