Sometimes you just want a clean install of an OS but don’t want to blow away your existing one. The standard way the WSL works is you install an image from the windows store and you can use it but you can’t easily make a copy of the same OS version.

First you have to grab an image from your provider, Ubuntu in this case:

  1. Find the version you want
  2. Navigate to the release you want
  3. Then download file for your version that ends in amd64-wsl.rootfs.tar.gz
  4. Import it to wsl: wsl --import Ubuntu20_new .\Ubuntu20_new C:\Users\jjsha\Downloads\ubuntu-20.04-server-cloudimg-amd64-wsl.rootfs.tar.gz
  5. Start the new distro wsl -d Ubuntu20_new
  6. Add the non root user adduser $USER
  7. Add user to sudo adduser $USER sudo
  8. Set the default user in /etc/wsl.conf 
    [user]
default=$USER
  9. Open window terminal settings by pressing Ctrl + ,
  10. Click on Open JSON File on the bottom left
  11. Find the new distro and add a startingDirectory field to it 
    "guid": "{5ca3d2c1-abcd-0123-9876-8458884aefc3}",
"name": "Ubuntu20_new",
"source": "Windows.Terminal.Wsl",
"startingDirectory": "//wsl$/Ubuntu20_new/home/$USER/",
  12. Restart the image wsl -t Ubuntu20_new