Updated April 10, 2022, with current Alpine instructions, Debian/Ubuntu package signing tweaks (no more apt-key), and better guidance for handling iptables in Debian. A little more suggestion about TCP access, as well. And further emphasis on the optional nature of the
/mnt/wsl/shared-dockersocket directory.
Most popular Linux distributions use systemd as the init system. It is like a Swiss-army knife that controls startup, shutdown, service monitoring, and so much more.
In late 2022 Microsoft announced systemd support in WSL.
Prior to that point, however, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) danced to its own initialization tune, and distros running on WSL did not use systemd, and did not generally employ a traditional init system.
This taught folks like me something: I don’t always need to have systemd or other init system for a good Linux experience. Running WSL without systemd is OK.
Collect them all! Install Winget, Chocolatey and Scoop. (I just put the “vs.” in there as clickbait.) They make installing and managing software on Windows so much easier. They are different tools, though, and I suggest that their usage depends on the scenario.
Using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), we have a choice of Linux distributions available in the Windows Store, such as Ubuntu, Kali, Debian, etc.