Upgrade WSL from Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04

I wanted to move an existing WSL installation from Ubuntu 24.04 to Ubuntu 26.04 without creating a second distro and manually copying everything across. The important requirement was to keep the existing contents: home directories, installed packages, shell configuration, SSH keys, WSL settings, scripts, and project files. The approach in this post is an in-place release upgrade. It runs the Ubuntu release upgrade inside the existing Ubuntu-24.04 WSL instance. It is different from installing a new Ubuntu distro and importing files into it. ...

August 9, 2026 · 11 min · PwshTips