I've run Debian testing and unstable on WSL lately and it's a fine experience. I don't know about Ubuntu, but for Debian, it's a matter of changing your /etc/ap

I've run Debian testing and unstable on WSL lately and it's a fine experience. I don't know about Ubuntu, but for Debian, it's a matter of changing your /etc/apt/sources.list to point to your desired version and then: $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade Personally, I've ended up back on Debian stable for WSL, because I have reasons to use a VM rather than WSL. So WSL is now just a dumb ssh terminal into a local VM. If you're curious, the reasons are primarily to do with speed of disk access operations. I also run into some issues with several emacs add-ins that I can work around but don't care to.* I also run vcxsrv on Windows, and ssh X forwarding didn't work immediately, but a low-priority to-do is to use this to run local-VM X clients connecting to the Windows X server. * I sometimes stop to ponder the things that I find acceptable to troubleshoot and the things I don't want to put the effort into. For reference, see above about local VM and X Forwarding....