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    A good question, and a good answer, so plus one. I thought that service cmd belongs to systemd. I have on wsl the error from the OP, but mariadb works with service.service is a wrapper and can be used with init.d and systemctl. Commented Mar 10, 2022 at 9:57
  • I'm confused. WSL used to have systemctl/d, WSL used to work fine with mounted drives, WSL used to be a very solid representation of Ubuntu... now I'd call it Winbuntu as it seems its no longer ubuntu but windows version of it corrupted to fit in WSL... which is strange, because I remember when WSL 1 came out I was able to install TRUE ubuntu on it without issue through powershell instead of the windows store. What happened to WSL? Is there any way to get true ubuntu back? Commented Jul 19, 2022 at 13:35
  • @gunslingor I agree ... you're confused ;-). But seriously, you are almost certainly remembering this incorrectly (or perhaps nostalgically). WSL has never had Systemd support. Here's the Github issue on the topic, opened just 15 days after the first WSL1 beta was made available. Commented Jul 19, 2022 at 15:38
  • A related comment in that issue, "running WSL without cron or syslog or sshd or a terminal emulator (what we have got is sort of a console emulator) and other servers/daemons/background tasks, is not the same as running an Ubuntu developer machine", shows that people didn't considered it "real Ubuntu" even back then. WSL has made great progress over the years since then, but it's still a developer tool on Windows, not a virtual machine designed to replicate a "full Ubuntu (or other Linux) environment." Commented Jul 19, 2022 at 15:39
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    @QuolonelQuestions Great question - The results there indicate the In-box version. If you had the Store version, it would return the actual version (and some additional info). Commented Dec 15, 2022 at 22:11