Microsoft and Canonical have been working together to add systemd support to WSL. This will enable several applications to run on WSL instances including snap, microk8s, and systemctl.
Microsoft has announced that it has brought systemd support to WSL with the help of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Due to some big changes that had to be made to WSL, Microsoft is making support opt-in for the time being, so existing WSL distros aren’t affected. After it gathers feedback, it’ll look at how to support systemd by default.
It was important for Microsoft to add systemd support to WSL because most popular Linux distribution use it by default.