Docker Desktop is not launching at all

Docker Desktop
1

I am learning Docker first time. A couple of weeks ago I have installed docker desktop and used it for few days. Then when I relaunched it after couple of weeks of break I don’t see the app initiating even. Nothing shows up. Here are the things I tried so far.

  1. uninstalled/installed docker many times.
  2. Checked the wsl list
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> wsl -l -v
  NAME      STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu    Stopped         2
  1. I don’t see docker-desktop or docker-desktop-data listed here.
  2. ran below from power shell and got an error
docker run hello-world
docker: error during connect: Head "http://%2F%2F.%2Fpipe%2FdockerDesktopLinuxEngine/_ping": open //./pipe/dockerDesktopLinuxEngine: The system cannot find the file specified.
  1. Docker Desktop Service is running.
  2. OS I am using is Windows 11

Hope you guys can help…

Thank you

2

Do you remember how you installed it? If you used the HyperV backend, you won’t see WSL distros, but I assume you searched for those because you saw the distribution there before.

And only Linux containers need the WSL distribution, although I think the distribution would be there even when using Windows containers, especially if you used it previously, as it would not be deleted just becuse someone switches to windows containers.

If you still have the issue, please, show the output of

docker version
docker info

You can remove any private information from the output like IP address or username. And please, sue code blocks, not quotes. I fixed your original post too. More info about formatting: How to format your forum posts

3

Thank you for getting back. I actually managed to resolve it by uninstalling again and this time removing all the hidden Docker folders in user directory. Also removed all Docker registry entries. Beside I also moved from Windows Home edition to Windows Pro (not sure if that helped as I tried a lot of things).
After all these steps I was still getting the error because Docker tries to write into some files in user Directories and they were hidden and read only. Once I removed the read only on everything in the docker user directory it worked.

Hope these steps help others who might be seeing the same issue.

By the way below is output of the >wsl -l -v command now…

NAME STATE VERSION

  • Ubuntu Stopped 2
    docker-desktop Stopped 2