Fedora 42 Cleared To Ship WSL Images For Easy Windows Subsystem For Linux Use

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft’s Windows 11 WSL2 environment.

This change isn’t about adding Fedora as a Linux distribution within the Windows Store but is about simply building Fedora Linux WSL tarballs that can be loaded manually by interested users. It’s not as streamlined as being on the Windows Store but much better than the status quo at least. The change proposal explains:

“Recent versions of Windows support running Linux guests via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). These can be distributed via tarballs, Appx packages, or via the Windows Store. The purpose of this change is to start producing Fedora images for users of WSL.

Distributing images via the Windows Store requires agreeing to the store policies and developer agreement, which is something Fedora has historically not been comfortable with. This change proposal is to distribute a tarball. In recent versions of WSL (version 2.4.4 and greater), the user experience has been greatly improved for WSL images outside the store. These include allowing tarballs to distribute first-time setup scripts and icons as part of the distribution instead of as a Windows application, as well as click-to-install support for tarballs using the “.wsl” file extension. Therefore, this proposal will work best with version 2.4.4+ of WSL, although documentation will be provided for users on older releases.”

By providing a dedicated Fedora WSL image the hope is that more will try out the Fedora environment from their Windows installations. In turn should users then decide to run a bare metal Linux installation on their system(s), the hope is according to the change proposal that they will be more likely to go with Fedora.

The FESCo approval for the Fedora WSL images was granted via this ticket. Those wanting to learn more about the Fedora 42 WSL plans can do so via the Fedora Wiki.