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I have been using Ubuntu on Windows via WSL for about a year and it works quite well.

The terminal I use for Ubuntu on Windows is wsltty, which is a thin wrapper around mintty and other tools for starting WSL sessions. Recently, when I start clicking the WSL Terminal icon, it start a Window and then quit silently.

By looking at the property of “WSL Terminal” icon, I find that the default command that wsltty uses to start the Ubuntu terminal is:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\bin\mintty.exe --WSL= --configdir="%APPDATA%\wsltty" -~

In order to find possible error message, I did a little search. I find that we can add the -h always option to force the terminal window to stay open even if there are some error in the process. The whole command is:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\bin\mintty.exe --WSL= --configdir="%APPDATA%\wsltty" -~ -h always

The error message I saw is like the following:

wslbridge error: failed to start backend process
note: bash.exe output: Windows Subsystem for Linux has no installed distributions.
Distributions can be installed by visiting the Microsoft Store:
https://aka.ms/wslstore

What?? I have apparently installed a WSL distribution. In order to confirm that, I find from here that the location for a WSL distribution is something like the following:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\rootfs\

This is the directory where the root of the Ubuntu for Windows resides. I opened the similar folder on my Windows and found that the rootfs folder is indeed gone!