It wasn't an April Fool's prank when Microsoft announced the addition of AlmaLinux[1] to the line of distributions available for WSL. From the Microsoft Store, it's now possible to download a version of AlmaLinux to run on Windows.
AlmaLinux now joins the growing list of Linux distributions for WSL that includes Ubuntu, OpenSuse Leap, Kali Linux, Debian, Oracle Linux, and Suse Linux Enterprise. This server-centric Linux distribution came into being soon after it was announced that CentOS would be migrating to CentOS Stream back in 2020.
A quick search in the Microsoft Store makes it easy to download and install AlmaLinux 8 for WSL. Just make sure your host system is a PC with either ARM64 or x86 architecture, includes more than 4GB of RAM, and already has Windows Subsystem for Linux installed. The download of AlmaLinux is a svelt 83MB and can run on either Windows 10 or 11. If you don’t already have WSL installed on Windows, open Powershell (with elevated privileges) and issue the command wsl --install.
Although this has yet to be announced on the official AlmaLinux blog[2], the distribution is officially available in the Microsoft Store and can be added to WSL for free.
