Ubuntu in WSL comes with systemd enabled. Debian doesn't, and you have to enable it yourself.
That's why I chose to have people use Ubuntu in WSL, despite the other downsides. One less step to setup a Linux environment on Windows makes the process smoother.
What IDE's have you tried?
Kate (and vscode) aren't really IDE's, they're more like extremely extensible text editors. You can make them IDE's, but they dob't come like that out of the box.
On the other hands, actual IDE's often have the inbuilt capability to install and manage the programming language related software.