The Windows Subsystem for Linux - which is no longer being referred to officially as "Bash on Windows" - has grown up.

You no longer need to put your Windows 10 system into Developer Mode to use the WSL.

And now there are three different WSLs: Ubuntu, openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Fedora is supposed to be on the way, but I haven't heard anything about progress toward that happening in a long time.

According to Microsoft, you can copy your current Ubuntu files to /mnt/c/tmp/WSL-backup, or a similar directory, and then use lxrun /install from the Windows command line to remove the old WSL. Then you can install a new WSL and move your files back after that.

Fellow Redditors suggested that I create a tar archive of my files, stow it anywhere, and then unpack it in my new /home directory when I remove the old WSL and install the new one via the Windows Store.

The only thing keeping me from doing it is what always keeps me from switching Linux distros: The need to re-install all of my packages.

The other thing keeping me from making this move is that my laptop hasn't yet received the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. To successfully install the new WSL, your Windows build needs to be 16215.0 or higher. According to my About Windows 10 page, I'm on 15063.674. So not only can I wait, unless I opt to get the updates early (and I'm sure there is a way to do this), I must wait. And honestly, that doesn't bother me one bit.

Update: (July 4, 2018): Here is my Independence Day update to these instructions. The "original" instructions should work fine, but the "new" ones are better:

The original instructions

Originally I created the tar archive of my home directory in my home directory:

$ tar -zcvf steven.tar.gz /home/steven
$ cp steven.tar.gz /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/

And to open it up when your new WSL is set up, go to your home directory:

$ tar -zxvf /path/to/steven.tar.gz

Then you'll have a home directory within your home directory (i.e. for me /home/steven/steven, and you can copy what you want from one to the other). It's better not to overwrite everything in your "new" Linux /home directory because it might handle things in your dot files differently, and I can see conflicts arising from npm modules, ruby gems and whatever else you happened to install in the course of working in your Windows box's Linux side.

I'm not sure how much of a problem it is, but creating the tar archive while in your home directory causes tar to throw the following error:

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
... (lots of output)
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

There are explanations of what this error message means on the Internet, but they didn't really help me understand it.

So I did things a different way. If you just want to know how to make the backup and restore it, start here:

The new instructions

First, on the Windows side, create a directory in which to hold this backup. I created one called linux_backup in my OneDrive Documents directory.

Then go into your WSL, which will put you in your home directory on the Linux side (which for me is /home/steven).

From there, to avoid the error message I go up one directory and do the tar operation from there. I use pwd a couple of times to confirm where I am in the filesystem, and I use chown to make sure the restored archive belongs to my Linux user and group.

Note: in all of these instructions, things after a $ are things you type at the command line. Lines that don't begin with a $ represent output in the terminal (and you don't have to type them).

Here is what my terminal session looks like:

$ pwd
/home/steven
$ cd ..
$ pwd
/home
$ sudo tar -zcvf steven.tar.gz steven
$ ls
steven steven.tar.gz
$ chown steven:steven steven.tar.gz
$ sudo cp steven.tar.gz /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/

Now you have your tar archive on the Windows side.

After you set up your "new" WSL, you can copy the tar archive from the Windows side into your new Linux /home directory. As before, I use a couple of pwd command to confirm where I am in the Linux filesystem. (And remember, use YOUR home directory and Windows path to your tar archive, not mine):

$ pwd
/home/steven
$ sudo cp /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/steven.tar.gz steven.tar.gz
$ sudo chown steven:steven steven.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf steven.tar.gz
$ ls
steven
$ cd steven
$ pwd
/home/steven/steven

Now you have your "new" home directory at /home/steven, and your "old" files at /home/steven/steven. Copy what you want from old to new, and you should be ready to go.

Once you confirm that all your files are in there, you can blow away the old WSL and use your new one. And you should still have a copy of the tar archive on your Windows filesystem if anything goes wrong.

Before going forward, it's a good idea to read up on how to make a tar.gz archive.

My question (and maybe yours): Why do this from the Ubuntu/WSL shell when you could just copy/paste from the Windows file manager, or why not just copy the files via the Ubuntu shell to the Windows portion of the disk?

Answer (and I did test this): In both cases, even when using Bash to do the recursive cp of all the files, you lose your Linux file permissions. In my case, all of my rw-r--r-- files turned into rwxrwxrwx, which is NOT what you (or I) want.

Update on 4/23/18: This entry was written last October but not published until now. It kind of got lost, and I just found and finished it. Though the new WSL is out, and you can now install Debian (which I would) or SUSE (probably not), I'm leaning toward sticking with Ubuntu because it's working so well, though I'm a longtime Debian fan and user (though not so much lately).

Whatever I do, I probably need to move to the "new" WSL, though I haven't done it yet. Everything is working, so it's hard to muster the motivation to mess with what until now has been a successful installation of Ubuntu in Windows 10.

Update on 7/4/18: The new instructions for making an archive of the /home directory are more detailed and a little more roundabout. But they should work, and tar won't throw any errors.

Also, I still haven't moved to a new WSL. The current Ubuntu WSL is still on 16.04 LTS, and that's the same version as my "old" WSL. When the Ubuntu WSL moves to 18.04 LTS, then it'll be time to make the change.

Microsoft is ticking all of the right boxes with the Windows Subsystem for Linux, announcing that it will be bringing Fedora and OpenSUSE to the WSL as well as offering installation via the Windows Store.

There will also be the option of installing the Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE version of the WSL at the same time, though it is unclear if they will have separate filesystems, and/or the option of sharing a single Linux filesystem.

I'm not a SUSE user but am a longtime Fedora user, and having the option of Fedora is a very attractive one because it's that much easier to get newer versions of things like Node, Ruby, Java, etc., in this developer-centric distribution that is a lot more stable than you'd think.

As far as installation goes, the current way you get the Ubuntu-powered WSL on your Windows 10 system is more than a little bit hacky, and the use of the Windows Store will make it easier and more inviting for new developers as well as "new" Windows "power users" coming over from years of desktop Linux (like me).

There isn't much in the way of announcements on adding graphical capabilities to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, though Microsoft isn't discouraging those who are already adding an X server to their WSL, but I figure official support for Linux GUI software in the WSL is somewhere on the roadmap.

For now I'm happy to be using a Ubuntu-based system for the first time in a long time (after the aforementioned years of Fedora). As I've written previously, the move from 14.04 to 16.04 was pretty crucial because I was able to get away from the super-old Node.js in 14.04, though the newer Unison required me to pin the old Unison from 14.04 to maintain compatibility with the Unison on my server.

While I've been happy to learn that you can pretty much download a Ubuntu package from the archive and install it with dpkg, I haven't yet experimented with PPAs in the WSL. Might be time for that.

Changing the directory: Since the WSL is rapidly going from a Ubuntu-only offering to one that will offer Fedora and SUSE, I'm changing this directory's name from ubuntu_on_windows to linux_on_windows.

I decided to give the new Microsoft Edge browser a try in Windows 10. When I open it, I get this page that says Google Chrome is 5 percent slower than Edge, and Mozilla Firefox is 9 percent slower.

Four things:

• From my use, I would figure that Chrome is at least 25 percent faster than Firefox.
• The scores are based on Google Octane, which is being mothballed because everybody is cheating with it.
• I'm supposed to get excited about a 5 percent speed improvement? Sharing bookmarks and passwords across Google Chrome instances on Windows 10, Windows 7, Linux and Android is more important than a small speed improvement that may not even be real.
• The more I look at this, saying Chrome is 5 percent slower than Edge doesn't mean that Edge is 5 percent faster than Chrome. Am I right, math and statistics experts? According to my calculations, if Chrome is 5 percent slower than Edge, that means Edge is 19 percent faster than Chrome. Why doesn't Microsoft tout that statistic, which sounds a whole lot better?

Nonetheless, I'm giving the browser a tryout while I'm still using Windows 10.