Fedora 42 Now Available as Official Distribution in Windows Subsystem for Linux

Fedora 42 has been introduced as the latest official distribution within the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), catering specifically to developers. This announcement comes after a slight delay, as Fedora had already been accessible among the officially supported distributions for several weeks.

The WSL image for Fedora 42 exhibits minimal differences from the cloud and container images of the distribution. However, it is optimized for developer use, featuring essential tools such as man pages, wget, and vim pre-installed. Additionally, both X11 and Wayland are preconfigured for use within the WSL environment.

Users can easily install Fedora 42 via the command line by executing wsl.exe --install FedoraLinux-42, which automatically downloads the image from the Microsoft Store. Once installed, users can launch Fedora with the command wsl -d FedoraLinux-42. Alongside Fedora, Microsoft also recently added Arch Linux as an official WSL distribution. Users can view all available distributions by running wsl.exe --list --online and install their choices with wsl.exe --install . Other official distributions include Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Upon the first launch, Fedora prompts the user to create a name and automatically sets up a user account with sudo privileges, without requiring a password. In line with other Red Hat-based distributions, software installation on Fedora is conducted via RPM packages, utilizing the dnf package manager. While Flatpak is not included by default in the WSL image, users can install it manually using sudo dnf install flatpak, granting access to the extensive software portfolio available on Flathub.

Notably, Fedora 42 does not support Windows 10. WSL allows users to execute Linux applications directly from Windows without the need for additional hardware, dual-boot setups, or virtual machines. It is compatible with Windows 10 and the associated server versions; however, due to the imminent end of support for Windows 10, Fedora developers will only provide support for Windows 11 and installations on Windows Server 2022 and 2025. For operation under Windows Server 2022, the installation of update KB5014678 is mandatory.

For comprehensive details regarding Fedora 42 in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, users can refer to both Microsoft's developer blog and Fedora's documentation. Similar to the workstation version of Fedora 42, the WSL image includes numerous developer tools, such as GCC 15, LLVM 20, PHP 8.4, and Python versions ranging from 3.9 to 3.14 alpha.