TL;DR Here is an approach to work with a non-WSL Linux guest (with VirtualBox or VmWare) and launching native Windows commands (f.e. MS Office Excel) -- Hi all, Some people have WSL2. Some people not, like me, and we are in the middle-of-nowhere with WSL1, as we are not able to do real stuff with Docker, Kubernetes, and so on, because WSL1 lacks the needed capabilities that a real Linux kernel has, so the only solution (see rants section below) is to stick with VirtualBox (or VmWare if you prefer) and work isolated from Windows apps. But here's a way to overcome such limitations. The idea is to run a small agent in the Windows side (the host) that will be capable of running whatever command you send from the Linux side (the guest). In order to do that, you'll need: Windows: Java 11 (https://adoptopenjdk.net/?variant=openjdk11&jvmVariant=hotspot) Groovy (https://dl.bintray.com/groovy/maven/apache-groovy-binary-3.0.4.zip) Linux: Netcat ...