Microsoft finally makes Fedora an official Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution

Well, it has finally happened. Fedora Linux is now officially available as a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution! That’s right, folks, following prior testing, you can now run Fedora 42 natively inside Windows using WSL. As someone who considers Fedora to be my favorite Linux distribution, this is a pretty exciting development.

Installing it is simple enough. Just open up a terminal and type wsl --install FedoraLinux-42 to get started. After that, launch it with wsl -d FedoraLinux-42 and set your username. No password is required by default, and you’ll automatically be part of the wheel group, meaning you can use sudo right out of the gate.

This WSL release of Fedora 42 doesn’t come bloated with unnecessary packages, which I appreciate. It includes the essentials, like the powerful DNF package manager, and gives users the freedom to build out their system as needed. One thing worth noting is that Flatpak isn’t installed by default, so if you want graphical apps, you’ll need to run sudo dnf install flatpak and then go through the Flathub setup process. It’s an extra step, but nothing too painful.

The Fedora team isn’t done either. Work is already underway to improve Flatpak support and add hardware-accelerated graphics for GUI applications running in WSL. That’s going to matter a lot for users who want a richer desktop experience inside Windows.

Fedora showing up as an official WSL option makes sense. Ubuntu’s been dominating the WSL space for years, but it’s good to see Fedora finally getting in the mix. For Windows users curious about Linux, or Fedora fans like me who have to dip into Windows now and then, this is a welcome addition.