Fedora has officially made its way to Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), beginning with the latest Fedora 42.

WSL allows users to run Linux distributions within Windows, giving them access to Linux apps and services. WSL has become a popular option, especially among developers who need to take advantage of Linux capabilities, but are otherwise stuck in the Windows ecosystem.

In a development blog post, Jeremy Cline, a member of Microsoft’s Linux Community Engineering, announced Fedora 42’s availability.

We’re pleased to announce that one of the latest additions to the list of official WSL distros is Fedora Linux! The Fedora Project has taken advantage of WSL’s new tar-based architecture to produce WSL images beginning with Fedora 42.

Cline highlighted the benefits Fedora brings.

Fedora uses the dnf package manager to install RPM packages. In addition to RPM packages, Fedora supports Flatpak for graphical applications. Note that flatpak is not currently included in the WSL image by default, so if you want to use Flatpaks you will need to install it with sudo dnf install flatpak. Next, follow the manual setup instructions for Flathub. After that, any application on Flathub is just a command away. For example, you could install Tally and count all the Fedora Linux releases.

The Fedora community works hard to ensure the newest stable versions of many popular projects are available. You’ll find the latest software development tools like GCC 15, LLVM 20, Golang 1.24, Ruby 3.4, PHP 8.4, Python 3.9 through the latest Python 3.14 alpha, and more.

As Cline points out, Fedora is a Linux distro that prioritizes providing current versions of the important packages, as opposed to a distro like Ubuntu and Debian, which often ship with older versions of packages in an effort to prioritize unchanging stability. At the same time, however, Fedora is not a rolling release distro like Arch, or openSUSE Tumbleweed, meaning it still provides a level of stability and reliability that works for most users. Fedora is often described as a semi-rolling release model, with many feeling it offers the best blend of reliability and up-to-date packages.

In addition to its semi-rolling nature, Fedora is also well-known for pushing the Linux desktop forward, often being one of the first distros to adopt new technologies, such as PipeWire, SELinux, Flatpak, Wayland, and others. As the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora is also an important distro for developers that work in the RHEL space.

It’s a safe bet that Fedora will likely become one of the more popular options for WSL users.