GitHub - owu/wsl-dashboard: A GUI manager for WSL featuring a modern UI — a lightweight, low‑memory, high‑performance dashboard to manage WSL instances.

A modern, high-performance, lightweight, and low-memory WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) instance management dashboard. Built with Rust and Slint for a premium native experience.

Notice:

- WSL Dashboard is not distributed through the Microsoft Store.
- Any application listed there under the name "WSL Dashboard" is unauthorized and may be counterfeit.
- Please do not download it to avoid potential scams.

📑 Table of Contents

🌍 Language Support
🚀 Key Features & Usage
⚙️ Configuration & Logs
🖼️ Screenshots
🎬 Operation Demo
💻 System Requirements
📦 Installation
🛠️ Tech Stack & Performance
🤝 Community Support
❤️ Support this project
⭐️ Labor of love
📄 License

🌍 Language Support

English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Urdu, Indonesian, German, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Slovak, Slovenian, Icelandic, Vietnamese, Telugu, Javanese, Thai, Tamil, Filipino, Punjabi, Malay, Polish, Ukrainian, Persian, Kannada, Marathi, Hausa, Burmese, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Cebuano, Malayalam, Sindhi, Amharic

🚀 Key Features & Usage

Modern Native UI: Intuitive GUI with Dark/Light mode support, smooth animations, and high-performance rendering powered by Skia.
System Tray Integration: Full support for system tray minimizing (~10MB RAM usage), double-click to toggle, and a functional right-click menu.
Intelligent Startup: Configure the dashboard to start with Windows, minimize to tray (silent mode with /silent), and auto-shutdown distributions on exit.
Comprehensive Instance Control: One-click Start, Stop, Terminate, and Unregister. Real-time status monitoring and detailed insights into disk usage and file locations.
Distro Management: Set as default, migration (Move VHDX to other drives), and export/clone to .tar or .tar.gz archives.
Quick Integration: Instant launch into Terminal, VS Code, or File Explorer with customizable working directories and startup script hooks.
Distro Installation: Install Linux distributions via Microsoft Store, GitHub, local files (RootFS/VHDX), or Online Mirrors (with auto speed-test to pick the fastest mirror and built-in RootFS download helper).
Global Safety: Mutex locks for safe concurrent migration/backup operations and automatic Appx cleanup on removal.
Ultra-Low Memory Footprint: Highly optimized for efficiency. Silent startup (system tray) uses only ~10MB RAM. Windowed mode usage varies by font complexity: ~18MB for standard languages (English, German, Spanish, etc.) and ~38MB for large font languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.).
Advanced Networking: Seamless port forwarding management (with automatic firewall rule creation) and global HTTP proxy configuration for unified connectivity.
USB Device Management: Full integration with usbipd-win for effortless binding, attaching, and managing of local USB devices across your WSL instances directly from the dashboard UI.

⚙️ Configuration & Logs

All configuration is managed through the Settings view:

Choose the default installation directory for new WSL instances.
Configure the log directory and log level (Error / Warn / Info / Debug / Trace).
Pick the UI language or let it follow the system language.
Toggle dark mode and whether the app can auto-shutdown WSL after operations.
Configure how often the app checks for updates (daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly).
Enable automatic startup on system boot (with automatic path repair).
Set the app to minimize to the system tray on startup for a distraction-free experience.
Configure the close button to minimize to the system tray instead of exiting.
Customize the sidebar by toggling the visibility of specific feature tabs.

Log files are written to the configured log directory and can be attached when reporting issues.

🖼️ Screenshots

Home (Light & Dark Mode)

USB & Collapse menu

Network

Add Instance & Settings

About & Donate

🎬 Operation Demo

Help us improve! Watch our intro video and share your thoughts.

💻 System Requirements

Windows 10 or Windows 11 with WSL enabled (WSL 2 recommended).
At least one WSL distribution installed, or permission to install new ones.
64-bit CPU; 4 GB RAM or more recommended for smooth multi-distro usage.

📦 Installation

Option 1: Download prebuilt binary

The easiest way to get started is to use the precompiled release:

Go to the GitHub Releases page.
Download the latest wsldashboard executable for Windows.
Extract (if packaged) and run wsldashboard.exe.

No installer is required; the app is a single portable binary.

Option 2: Build from source

Ensure you have the Rust toolchain (Rust 1.92+ or newer) installed.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/owu/wsl-dashboard.git
cd wsl-dashboard

Build and run:
- For development:
- Optimized release build, using the build script:
  
  The build script requires the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain.
```
.\build\portable\build.ps1
```

🛠️ Tech Stack & Performance

Core: Implemented in Rust for memory safety and zero-cost abstractions.
UI Framework: Slint with high-performance Skia rendering backend.
Async Runtime: Tokio for non-blocking system commands and I/O.
Performance Highlights:
- Responsiveness: Near-instant startup and real-time WSL status monitoring.
- Efficiency: Ultra-low resource usage (see Key Features for details).
- Portability: Optimized release build produces a single compact executable.

🤝 Community Support

A big thank you to the following communities for their support:

Rust Programming Language - For the powerful and safe programming language
Slint | Declarative GUI for Rust, C++, JavaScript & Python - For the modern UI framework
WSL: Windows Subsystem for Linux - For the amazing Windows Subsystem for Linux
Tokio - An asynchronous Rust runtime - For the efficient async runtime
Windows Developer Community - For continuous platform improvements
Reddit - For global community discussions and support
Hacker News - For global community discussions and support
Linux.do - For popular community for IT professionals
V2EX - For Chinese tech community discussions

Your contributions and feedback make this project possible!

❤️ Support this project

This project is licensed under GPL-3.0 and is free for all users.
From feature development and daily testing to bug fixes, all work is done in spare time. The road of open source is not easy alone — your recognition and support give the project the confidence to keep going.
If this tool has genuinely helped you, consider lending a hand. All donations go toward server costs, version iterations, and feature improvements, keeping the project continuously updated and steadily progressing.
Every bit of kindness is a ray of starlight. Thank you again for your understanding and generosity!

Visit our donation page: https://www.wslui.com/donate/

⭐️ Labor of love

If you have found this project useful, I would be grateful if you could leave a star on GitHub. Your endorsement helps it reach a wider audience and is deeply appreciated. It is this encouragement that motivates me to keep building.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 – see the LICENSE file for details.

Built with ❤️ for the WSL Community.

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