On the last day of January, Oracle Linux 8.5, Big Red’s current version of RHEL, quietly appeared on the Windows Store.
It’s designed to run on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and says it requires Windows 10 version 19041.0 or newer. This is the much delayed Windows 10 May 2020 Update, also known as 20H1.
This is the first official presence of a member of the great Red Hat family – although Oracle Linux is not directly a Red Hat product, obviously – in Microsoft’s online souk.
In the Windows Store, if you search for Linux, you will find Ubuntu, both SUSE and openSUSE, Debian, Kali, Alpine, and Pengwin, which was designed for WSL. What you won’t see is Fedora, CentOS, RHEL or something like that. There is a so-called Fedora remix, but since it costs money while the real Fedora is free, we suggest you avoid it.
It’s not completely new. It’s possible to install Fedora in WSL2 – but that’s a whole other animal.
WSL2 runs a full Linux kernel in a virtual machine on Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. The original WSL, on the other hand, is a Windows kernel personality, distantly related to the POSIX environment that shipped with NT 3.1 just under 30 years ago.
It’s still an interesting step. WSL has been sidelined somewhat by WSL2: the latter means running a real Linux kernel, which means better compatibility. WSL1, on the other hand, uses fewer resources and integrates better with the rest of the operating system. ®
