What’s new in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in November 2024

The latest updates to WSL bring new enterprise security features, new improvements to WSL distros, and the announcement that RedHat is officially becoming a WSL distro!

Although you can run any Linux distro in WSL, being an official distro makes it easier for WSL users to install and discover it with actions like wsl --list --online and wsl --install. We’re excited to announce that Red Hat will soon be delivering a Red Hat Enterprise Linux WSL distro image in the coming months, and it will be shipped with the new tar based WSL distro architecture (which you can learn more about below). Thank you to the Red Hat team as their feedback has been invaluable as we built out this new architecture, and we’re looking forwards to the release!

“Developers have their preferred platforms for developing applications for multiple operating systems, and WSL is an important platform for many of them. Red Hat is committed to driving greater choice and flexibility for developers, which is why we’re working closely with the Microsoft team to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the largest commercially available open source Linux distribution, to all WSL users.”

We are releasing a new way to make WSL distros, with a new architecture that backs how WSL distros are packaged and installed. Up until now, you could make a WSL distro by either creating an appx package and distributing it via the Microsoft Store, or by importing a .tar file with wsl –import. We wanted to improve this by making it possible to create a WSL distro without needing to write Windows code, and for users to more easily install their distros from a file or network share which is common in enterprise scenarios.

Leave a Comment