How To Uninstall Wsl -
One last reboot. He opened PowerShell. He typed wsl hopefully, desperately.
After the reboot, Alex ran wsl --status . The command was dead. Good. But his disk space hadn't changed. He opened File Explorer and navigated to the hidden lair: C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\Packages He deleted any folder starting with CanonicalGroupLimited or TheDebianProject . Then, the real grave: C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\Docker and C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\wsl . He held Shift + Delete. how to uninstall wsl
'wsl' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Alex leaned back. The fan on his laptop spun down. The 40 gigabytes of phantom data were gone. No more grep in the wrong window. No more mysterious init processes. The ghost was dead. One last reboot
The Ghost in the Terminal
select vdisk file="C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\disk.vhdx" detach vdisk The virtual hard disk disconnected. He then ran the Windows Disk Cleanup tool as administrator, clicked "Clean up system files," and checked in the list. One final purge. After the reboot, Alex ran wsl --status
Alex was thorough. He opened diskpart as Admin and typed:
Alex opened PowerShell as Administrator. He knew you couldn’t just delete folders. WSL was a parasite—a beautiful, useful parasite that burrowed deep into the kernel. He typed the first incantation: