I got the attached screenshot when I started. I read plenty of posts in this forum about how to get WSL working with the summary being “it just works” (now, in 2024) e.g. How to use cursor on linux/wsl2? . But it did not, in fact, work on a fresh install when I already had WSL extension installed in my current vs code.
Instead I had to uninstall the WSL extension – after opening a new workspace because my active vs code workspaces are all in WSL, before opening a non WSL workspace, it wouldn’t even let me uninstall the extension, even tho it was erroring out. And then reinstall it following these instructions: Extension | Cursor - The AI-first Code Editor (download the extension’s vsix file from ms marketplace)
After I did that, then I had to select the distro to connect to, and then it worked to load my existing projects in WSL.