Does anyone else experience instability with Cursor and WSL?

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1

I keep having this cycle of problems that seems to becoming more frequent. I start cursor, i have 4 repos I am working across all in the project. All is good for many queries, edits and a few hours and then all of a sudden Cursor gets laggy and crashes. I thought it might be the number or terminals I had open, but I eliminated that with no terminal use, it could be that one of the files I have open is a log file and I use the editor to view the log, and the log is getting cleared, maybe that it could be an undo buffer bug? I don’t know, but whatever it is, it is getting ANAF.

4

I have had a similar situation. Compared to SSH, WSL doesn’t seem to be as stable. For example, yesterday I experienced repeated crashes that caused the plugins to keep reporting errors, and the issue was only resolved after I reinstalled Cursor.

6

Hey, thanks for the report. This looks like an extension host issue in WSL.

Quick question: are you using the WSL extension for Cursor? In the bottom-left of the editor it should say WSL: <distro name>. If it doesn’t, the problem is most likely that Cursor is running via Windows instead of the WSL environment.

Fix:

  • Install the WSL extension in Cursor (from the Extensions marketplace)
  • Open a WSL terminal
  • cd into your project directory
  • Run cursor . from there

The WSL extension lets Cursor run extensions directly inside WSL. It’s much faster and more stable, and it helps prevent extension host crashes.

Here’s a thread where this helped another user with the same issue: How to recover from "Extension host terminated unexpectedly 3 times..."?

Let me know if this helps.

7

Hi Dean, yes I am connecting exactly how you described. I already have WSL installed. Now that you mentioned it, I did remove it, and reinstall it to see if that will help.

I do not open cursor from the WSL project folder as you describe. I normally open cursor from my Windows task bar and open WSL as a recent project. When I try the command you suggested I saw an access error and I didn’t bother to figure out why because opening from Windows seemed to work.

I did try setting these folders to rwx but it didn’t correct it.

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Alan

11

I can see a screenshot with an error on /run/user/1000/. This is a common XDG_RUNTIME_DIR issue in WSL.

A few things to check:

  1. Which WSL distro are you using, and is systemd enabled? Check in your WSL terminal:

    cat /etc/wsl.conf

    If systemd is disabled, the /run/user/1000 folder might not be created correctly.

  2. Try creating the directory manually and setting the right permissions:

    sudo mkdir -p /run/user/1000
sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) /run/user/1000
chmod 700 /run/user/1000
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000

  3. Then try running cursor . again from the WSL terminal.

If that doesn’t help, please share the output of:

  • wsl --version
  • cat /etc/wsl.conf
  • ls -la /run/user/
12

Hi Dean,

Thanks for the steps. All of those made it work.

So this launches cursor in an ubuntu shell thing, that personally I don’t like too much because it’s usability is worse. I suspect that this is the native ubuntu version. I cannot resize the vertical scroll panel widths and the window sizing with the double title bars is flakey. I prefer the native Windows version and connect from the bottom left. But thanks for the assist.. appreciate the alt advice.

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14

It is not necessary to install Cursor inside the WSL environment; instead, I would recommend using the WSL extension within Cursor installed on the Windows side.

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Then, select the Remote Explorer (if it is not visible, you might need to reload the window after installing the extension).

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From there, you can select your WSL distribution to open a new window inside that environment.