Red Hat is now officially available in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), giving users access to one of the premier enterprise Linux distributions (distro).

WSL gives Windows users the ability to run Linux apps and packages within Windows. The layer has been a boon to developers, giving them access to powerful Linux tools even if they’re working in a primarily Microsoft-based shop. In addition, WSL is useful for testing and compatibility purposes when developing apps.

Despite its popularity, Red Hat was notably absent from WSL, at least officially. That has finally changed, with Microsoft announcing that “Red Hat is becoming an official 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,” said Ron Pacheco, senior director, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ecosystem, Red Hat. “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.”

In addition, Microsoft is making it easier to make distros work with WSL with a new tar-based architecture.

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.

Microsoft also touts some of the improved security and zero trust features that are included with the latest version of WSL.

WSL has 2 new feature updates to enhance enterprise security with improved integrations in Intune and Entra ID!

The first feature is Intune device compliance integration with WSL is now generally available! This feature provides IT administrators the ability to enforce selective WSL distribution and version usage in their enterprise with conditional access. This enhances organizations’ security posture by enabling IT administrators to gain greater visibility into Linux distributions and versions running on managed Windows devices. WSL compliance status is now included when evaluating overall compliance of a Windows device that has both Windows and WSL compliance settings configured. In addition, users are presented with the familiar guided noncompliance remediation experience in Company Portal when noncompliant WSL instances are detected. You can learn more about how to get started with this feature at the Intune docs.

The second feature is that Microsoft Entra ID integration with WSL is now available for private preview! It provides a zero-trust experience while accessing protected enterprise resources from within a WSL distribution. It does this by adding better security around passing Entra tokens (so they don’t get passed via networking packets), and automatic connection for Linux processes to use the underlying Windows authentication. Please see this link to sign up for the private preview today and stay tuned for more updates on this feature!

The updates to WSL, including Red Hat’s official inclusion, are good news for Windows and Linux developers and system admins.