While I hate to be "that guy" who posts an answer to his own question, I went through more than a little pain to get things working, and I'd like to save the next guy the same amount of trouble. So, here is
What actually ended up working
For reasons I do not understand, my system worked when I ran contrary to the (quite sensible) recommendation from @allquixotic.
1) Disable LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT
This wound up being really difficult, simply because I had to find where it was set.
- In the folder
\etc\profile.d was a file wsl-integration.sh.
- The above file was actually a symlink; the actual file was
/usr/share/wslu/wsl-integration.sh
- In that file the variable
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT was set, so I commented out that line.
2) Do not use the -wgl command line argument (or its GUI equivalent) for VcXsrv
Since I was launching VcXsrv from a GUI client, this meant leaving the second option box, titles "Native opengl", unchecked.
Only once I had both those changes made (and did a fresh reboot to make sure no old settings for VcXsrv had persisted) then the gears in glxgears were turning at a normal rate, and I could reorient them using the arrow keys, just like they're supposed to work.
Best Answer
This question is quite old, but maybe my answer can help someone else.
Symbolic link work with two parameters, you must pick the directories that will be connected (symbolically) this for ubuntu or Debian dists.
ln -s /directory/to/link /directory/where/will/link
Windows Linux subsystem works in the same way, for an Ubuntu subsystem windows file system is mounted inside /mnt/ so if you do something like this:
ln -s /mnt/c/Users/Luis/Documents/server /var/www/html/
Then you will have a directory called server, inside of /var/www/html/ and any file or folder created in Users/Luis/Documents/server will be reflected inside the subsystem.