How to cleanly kill and restart XWayland?

[edburns]

Executive Summary

Due to #15 I am in need of a way to kill and restart XWayland cleanly. Please tell me how.

Details

Hello WSLg community,

I was highly motivated to move from WSL with VcXsrv on Windows 10 to WSLg on Windows 11 by this extremely friction creating bug: Clipboard stops working in Windows client. Imagine my disappointment when I realize the same kind of bug exists in WSLg (#15).

My remediation when using WSL on Windows 10 with VcXsrv was to simply kill and restart VcXsrv when the copy/paste stopped working. Looking at your README I am not clear on the best way to do the same remediation here. Is there some way to kill and restart XWayland?

Thanks,

Ed

[Biswa96]

It is somewhat possible. But one has to manually setup the WSLGd process from ground. This is literally what I am doing with WSLg in Windows 10. The summary goes like this - start user distribution -> start system distribution -> set all the environment variables which init does (e.g. WAYLAND_DISPLAY, DISPLAY, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR etc.) -> run WSLGd in system distribution.

[Biswa96]

Do you see /usr/bin/WSLGd process?

[edburns]

Now I do. I had to do ps -elf.

[edburns]

So, when the problem happens, can I simply do wsl --system, kill the WSLGd process and restart /usr/bin/WSLGd?

[Biswa96]

That should be the way. I just provided the hint about it. I am not using Windows 11 now (probably never will).

[edburns]

This absolutely did not work. When I started /usr/bin/WSLGd in the system distribution, an apparently infinite list of processes spawned and I had to force shut down the Windows 11 host machine. Still looking for a solution.

[onomatopellan]

On latest WSL from the store you can restart WSLg with Left-Ctrl + Left-Alt + Backspace.

To enable it, in PowerShell run notepad.exe $Env:USERPROFILE\.wslgconfig

and save the file with this content:

[system-distro-env]
WESTON_RDPRAIL_SHELL_ALLOW_ZAP=true

After wsl.exe --shutdown you should be able to restart WSLg manually.