Per prereqs that I’m aware of, I’ve installed a wsl2 Ubuntu instance. This is under my admin account and I’ve made this the “default” linux distro.
When I install docker destop, and check my wsl configuration, I see:
$ wsl -l -v
NAME STATE VERSION
* Ubuntu-26.04 Running 2
docker-desktop Stopped 2
$ wsl --version
WSL version: 2.7.3.0
Kernel version: 6.6.114.1-1
WSLg version: 1.0.73
MSRDC version: 1.2.6676
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.26100.1-240331-1435.ge-release
Windows version: 10.0.26200.8390
so my intention is to set my Ubuntu instance as the "…distros you want to access Docker from ", but when I attempt to do this from docker desktop settings, I get:
By admin account, do you mean an account in the Administrator group or the main Windows administrator?
When you install a WSL2 distribution, as far as I remember, it will be stored in your user profile folder. The Docker Desktop WSL distro will definitely be stored there. If you switch to an administrator and create WSL distros there, then when you click on the Docker Desktop icon to start Docker Desktop, that could start on behalf of another user, storing images in another folder.
If Docker Desktop says there are no WSL distributions, that could mean it canot find it with the user that runs Docker Desktop. Then the docker-desktop distribution will also be stopped, since Docker DEsktop is not running started by the Administrator, but by another user.
So can you be more specific about what you mean by “under my admin account”?
I could not reproduce it following my idea yet, but I have no better idea either. IF Docker DEsktop is running and you can run docker info command in a powershell or cmd without issues (can you?), than the docker-desktop distribution cannot be stopped. Unless you switched to Windows containers, but then I don’t think that checkbox would be visible for WSL2 integration at all.
