Okay there's a lot of reports here, I'm gonna try and distill this down Again, everything just works if starting from the Start menu tile in the standard conhost. So it would appear that there's nothing special about %USERPROFILE%, per se, but that setting a starting directory that exists inside the WSL distribution is what is currently not working in recent versions of WT. I did the same and it did work inside of Windows Terminal, On a whim, I then set the starting directory to /home/my-wsl-username as opposed to the default ~.

The very same distribution works just fine if I start it from the Start menu tile inside the standard CMD console host window instead of using WT.Īccording to the bug report on the WSL project, one user set the starting directory to %USERPROFILE% and then it worked.I have had no Windows Updates in over a year (a Windows Update in late 2019, and twice more in early 2020 DELETED ALL of my personal user data on my work laptop-so yeah, I no longer allow my laptop to update at this time) and the last time I used my distribution, only a few weeks ago, it was working just fine inside of Windows Terminal.I can confirm this is a problem with Windows Terminal because:

I reported over on the WSL GitHub project.

Windows terminal ubuntu