Design

Getting NixOS to run under WSL requires some workarounds:

• instead of directly loading systemd, we use a small shim that runs the NixOS activation scripts first
• some additional binaries required by WSL's internal tooling are symlinked to FHS paths on activation

Running on older WSL versions also requires a workaround to spawn systemd by hijacking the root shell and spawning a container with systemd inside. This method of running things is deprecated and not recommended, however still available as nixos-wsl-legacy.tar.gz or via wsl.nativeSystemd = false.