Ubuntu 20.04 not appearing in wsl.exe -l on Windows but is within Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to get Ubuntu 20.04 working with WSL2 on Windows 10 Home (10.0.19041 Build 19041) and so set the version to v2 for use with Docker Desktop.

I've set wsl --set-default-version 2 prior to installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from the Windows Store.

In the Ubuntu system (via Start Menu) I see:

$ wsl.exe -l -v
  NAME                   STATE           VERSION
* docker-desktop         Stopped         2
  Ubuntu-20.04           Running         1
  docker-desktop-data    Stopped         2

However, on the Windows host in PowerShell I do not see the Ubuntu distribution:

> wsl -l -v
  NAME                   STATE           VERSION
* docker-desktop         Stopped         2
  docker-desktop-data    Stopped         2

Why is the distro missing when running the command from the Windows host?

(Secondarily: I'm unsure why the Ubuntu is set to v1 when I've set the default install to be v2!)

Answer 1

In this case, as we confirmed in the comments, the problem turned out to be that PowerShell was being run in an elevated Admin session, so the wsl -l -v in PowerShell was retrieving (via registry entries) a different set of WSL instances that that from the (non-elevated user's) Start Menu.

For those that might run across this in the future, you can determine the Windows user for each instance and compare the two:

• In "plain" PowerShell, run Write-Host ([System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name)

• In the WSl instance which was run from the Start Menu, run powershell.exe -c "Write-Host ([System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name)". That's going to run a PowerShell subshell within the WSL instance to determine the user for the process.

It might also be useful to check the registry entries that WSL is using:

• PowerShell: Get-ChildItem "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss" -Recurse
• WSL: powershell.exe -c "Get-ChildItem 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss' -Recurse"