Recently I decided to give Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) another try. Actually, it was when I wanted to set up Jekyll for this site. I tried WSL on its initial release but didn’t stick with it. I was aware that it has steadily improved since then.

It’s good enough. The filesystem performance feels slow. I don’t have hard numbers, but running npm install on the same project seems to take much longer on WSL than on a VirtualBox VM.

I wanted to try installing and running more stuff, but I also did not want to pollute my main WSL distro with random packages, services, and what have you. That was when I found LxRunOffline.

LxRunOffline allows its users to install multiple instances of a WSL Linux distro, and more importantly for my purpose, duplicate a distro installation. (And much more!)

Now I have a base distro with zsh, ZIM, yadm, fzf, The Silver Searcher, and ssh configuration ready to be duplicated whenever I feel like trying something.