A desktop for WSL Containers

Manage containers, images, volumes and Compose stacks running on wslc.exe. Like Docker Desktop, without dragging a whole Electron app along.

Download for Windows View on GitHub

Windows 11 · x64 & ARM64 · No admin rights · MIT

RC Desktop dashboard showing running containers, images, volumes and the WSLC runtime environment

What it does

Rust + Slint. It starts fast, uses little memory, and just calls wslc.exe underneath.

Containers & stacks

Start, stop, restart and remove containers. Compose projects are grouped into stacks you can start, stop or take down at once.

Deploy three ways

A form with a live wslc run preview, a pasted docker-compose.yml, or a docker run command converted for you.

Compose with rcompose

wslc has no compose command, so RC Desktop ships with rcompose and streams its output into the app.

Logs, inspect, shell

View logs and inspect output, or open a shell in a container through Windows Terminal.

Images, volumes, networks

Pull and remove images, delete volumes and networks. Published ports are links straight to localhost.

Lives in the tray

Keeps running when closed, shows how many containers are up, can start with Windows, and has a shortcut to wsl --shutdown.

wslc doesn't like being called concurrently: two calls at once can fail with ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION. RC Desktop runs every command through a single queue and retries with backoff.

A quick tour

Everything you'd reach for in a container desktop, on top of wslc.

Stacks and containers

Compose projects show up as stacks with their running count. Expand one to stop, restart, open a shell, read logs or inspect each container. Published ports open in your browser.

Containers page with a Compose stack expanded into its containers, status badges and published ports

Deploy from Compose

Paste or open a docker-compose.yml, see the rcompose command it will run, and deploy the stack. Prefer a form or a docker run line? Those tabs are right there.

Deploy container page on the Compose tab with a sample compose file and the plan panel

Runtime at a glance

The WSLC page shows wslc, kernel and Windows versions, active sessions, where the settings file and rcompose live, and links to the docs.

WSLC page with runtime versions, sessions, settings file path and resource links

One-click cleanup

Prune stopped containers, dangling or unused images, networks and volumes. Each button tells you exactly which wslc … prune it runs.

Cleanup panel with buttons to prune containers, images, networks and volumes

Install

You need Windows 11 with the WSL container preview (wslc.exe) installed.

Installer

Download rcdesktop-setup.exe and run it. It installs per user with rcompose, a Start menu shortcut and an uninstaller.

Portable zip

Grab the .zip for your architecture from the latest release, unzip anywhere and run rcdesktop.exe.

From source

Rust 1.80+. There's a mock mode with fake data if you don't have wslc.

cargo run --release
cargo run -- --mock