WSL Ubuntu will not open

Question

I have installed WSL Ubuntu. When I click the Ubuntu icon at the Start menu it returns a command screen with username@computername:~$. I do not know what to enter after $. I have tried wsl and ububtu and other guesses to no effect.

Answer 1

I have tried wsl and ububtu and other guesses to no effect.

From the comments, it's not quite clear what you expect to be happening. I can see two possibilities:

• You seem to be thinking that you need to "login" to Ubuntu on WSL, which isn't the case.
• You seem to be trying to launch something; perhaps the Ubuntu desktop?

The prompt that you are seeing is simply the normal Bash shell prompt, and you can start typing Linux commands at that point. If you are expecting a Desktop experience, I would honestly recommend that you look at running Ubuntu in a virtual machine under Windows instead of using WSL2. While you can get a Desktop experience working, it's definitely not what WSL was designed for. WSL is always going to boot into a command-line/shell.

However, if you really do want to use Ubuntu through the command-line, try, for instance:

# Show the contents of your Ubuntu user's home directory
ls -lah ~

# Update all of the currently installed packages 
# for Ubuntu to the latest versions available in the repository
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

# Run the Python interpreter REPL
python3

# Run Windows Notepad
notepad.exe

# Open File Explorer on the current Linux directory
explorer.exe .

# Exit the Bash shell (and thus Ubuntu)
exit
# Also Ctrl+D

As for "logging in", there's really just no need with WSL. Ubuntu in WSL2 is running as a container rather than a virtual machine. You are simply "entering" the Ubuntu container. WSL2 uses your default username for this, and no password is necessary. See this answer for why this isn't a security issue.