Fedora 42 now an official Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distro

Modern Linux, vintage kernel

Good news for those fond of crimson headwear – Fedora 42 is now an official distro on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2).

When we wrote about the addition of Arch Linux on WSL2 a week ago, we showed Fedora in our screenshots, but now it's public and approved, alongside two versions of AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux.

Fedora 42 now runs in WSL2, but you get the old kernel version bundled with WSL2 – click to enlarge

Microsoft's announcement is from former Red Hatter Jeremy Cline, who has been overseeing the project for a while. He's the owner of the Fedora change that was approved back in January.

This is a welcome addition if you're used to Fedora's commands and way of doing things. We've noticed several positive reactions around the web – for instance, the news was submitted to Slashdot by Brian Fagioli, who wrote the BetaNews coverage.

There have been unofficial variants for years. The Register reported on a commercial respin back in 2019, and the next year Fedora Magazine gave instructions for installing Fedora 33. If you wanted to go the official way, though, until recently Oracle Linux was the freebie option. It launched on the Microsoft Store in 2022.

You don't get all of that bleeding-edge Fedora goodness, though. As The Reg described when WSL2 appeared, it uses a customized Linux kernel, which you can find on GitHub. At present, the latest under Releases is kernel 6.6, which is the long term kernel before the current 6.12 LTS.

We installed Fedora 42 on a fully updated copy of Windows 11 – well, as fully as Microsoft permits. Apparently, 24H2 isn't ready for our hardware yet. We found that it's running the same kernel 5.15.167-4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 as on our Arch instance. Kernel 5.15 was released way back in 2021, and as an LTS kernel, it's still supported and getting updates.

This is the price you pay for the rich integration between WSL2 guests and the host OS. Essentially, your shiny new Fedora 42 instance is a container with the latest Fedora userland, running on top of a shared copy of the custom WSL2 kernel – as the Fedora wiki explains. We tried using the wsl --update command to see if it would fetch a newer version of the kernel, but it claimed to be the latest release.

It's also possible to run the latest Fedora directly under Hyper-V in a VM – click to enlarge

If you want the latest kernel and so on, WSL2 is not the best way to go about it. WSL2 is based on the Hyper-V hypervisor, so we tried spinning up a Fedora 42 VM under that. Hyper-V offers two different generations, and we found that a Generation 2 VM wouldn't boot. We may have slipped up somewhere here.

The Reg FOSS desk doesn't use Windows much, and when we do run VMs on it, we generally use Oracle's VirtualBox, with which we're more familiar. We tried again with a Hyper-V Generation 1 VM and it booted up successfully, complete with kernel 6.14 – albeit very slowly. ®