Any devs coding in WSL2 on Windows out there?
I live in WSL2 all day, but when I switch to gaming or editing video in the evening, I want the machine to feel fully mine, with no VM sitting in the background holding gigabytes of RAM. So I shut WSL2 down.
The annoying part was never knowing whether it was actually down and the procedure of going into cmd and typing wsl --shutdown. Close every terminal and the VM is still alive. Ask WSL and it says no distributions are running while it still holds your memory. So I kept opening Task Manager.
I wrote a tray icon to fix that: wsl-tray.
Grey next to the clock means WSL2 is off. Green, orange or red means it is running, coloured by how much of the machine it uses. Hover for the real CPU and RAM numbers. One click shuts it down. Single exe, no installer, no admin rights.
It reads the same data Task Manager does, and it costs almost nothing to run: 282 KB on disk, around 3 MB of memory, one idle thread, 0.003 % of the machine.
Free and open source: https://github.com/ideaconnect/wsl-tray