Browsers and WSL

The integration between the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka WSL) and Windows works spectacularly most of the time, but occasionally things get a little troublesome. One such case was a change in browser behaviour that I noticed recently after upgrading to a new laptop.

On my old machine, I had an Ubuntu environment running under WSL2 and any time a browser was needed, it would open in the Windows environment. One common scenario was authentication, running az login when working with Azure.

After upgrading to my new laptop, I kept getting errors from xdg-open that indicated it was unable to open a browser.

A temporary workaround was to use --use-device-code with az login, but that wasn’t a satisfactory solution because I never remembered to use it first time.

It turns out the package wslu was pre-installed on earlier Ubuntu builds, but is not on the latest versions. Installing wslu via sudo apt install wslu fixed the issue.

One of the interesting things I found while investigating the problem was this post from one of the authors of Azure CLI authentication.