Oracle Linux appears somewhere unexpected: The Windows Store
On the last day of January, Oracle Linux 8.5, the current version of Big Red's RHEL-alike, quietly appeared on the Windows Store.
It's packaged to run on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and says it needs Windows 10 version 19041.0 or newer. That's the much-delayed Windows 10 May 2020 update, also known as 20H1.
This is the first official presence of any member of the greater Red Hat family – although Oracle Linux isn't directly a Red Hat product, obviously – in Microsoft's online souk.
In the Windows Store, if you search for Linux, you'll find Ubuntu, both SUSE and openSUSE, Debian, Kali, Alpine, and Pengwin, which was built for WSL. What you won't see is Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, or anything like it. There is also a Fedora remix for WSL that costs a few bucks if you want to contribute to that particular project; Fedora is otherwise free.
WSL2 runs a full Linux kernel in a managed VM on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. The original WSL, on the other hand, essentially provides Linux-compatible kernel interfaces to run Linux software.
