This is a follow-up to the previous article I have written on How to manually install WSL2 on a Windows 10 Virtual Machine as I learned an alternate method to install Windows App Bundle (.appxbundle/.msixbundle) files.

Context

In my previous article, I highlighted the issue of being unable to launch Ubuntu post installation and how to resolve it by gaining access to WindowsApp directory. I have been told that this is not recommended as it may cause unforeseen issues in the future.

Solution

Rather than gaining access to WindowsApp directory, and copying out the "installed files" to a separate directory. We can skip the installation step and extract the files manually, and place it somewhere we already have access.

Since the bundle files are just multiple files bundled together (think zip files), the content can also be extracted using the same method.

Ubuntu

As I have disabled virtualization on my machine, hence the error message is shown. Please ignore it.

This works at the timing of writing for Ubuntu2204-221101.AppxBundle

Windows Terminal

Knowing the above, it also could mean that if any other application faces the same issue, we could try to resolve it using the same means. I know that Windows Terminal does suffer from the same issue, hence, I did it the same way to show that it can be done.

This works at the time of writing for Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_Win10_1.15.3465.0_8wekyb3d8bbwe.msixbundle

Conclusion

I do think that this is a better solution compared to gaining access to WindowsApp directory.

If you have any other better method, please let me know!

Reference

• https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8031