Fedora Linux 42 WSL

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer developed by Microsoft that allows you to run a Linux environment directly on Windows without the need for a virtual machine or dual-boot setup. This guide will show you how I set up my Fedora Linux WSL, which is my main general purpose WSL distribution.

Requirements

• Windows 11 24H2

1. Installing Fedora Linux 42 WSL

First, enable or install Windows Subsystem for Linux. Install Fedora Linux WSL and set it as the default distribution.

wsl --install --distribution FedoraLinux-42
wsl --set-default FedoraLinux-42

Run the newly-installed distribution. It will ask you to enter a username. By default it does not ask you to set a password so we’ll set one ourselves. Obviously, replace <yourusername> with the username you’ve set earlier.

sudo passwd <yourusername>

Update the packages by performing an upgrade.

sudo dnf upgrade

2. Setting Up Fedora Linux 42 WSL

Create directories the I always have in my machines.

cd ~
mkdir Projects Temp

Edit DNF’s configuration file to make it faster in general. I also added some settings that I find convenient.

echo 'defaultyes=True' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
echo 'deltarpm=True' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
echo 'max_parallel_downloads=10' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

Now, we manually add RPMFusion.

# Enable RPMFusion repositories
sudo dnf install \
	https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm \
    https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

More setup information can be found in this link.

Verifying results

Verify the results by checking the outputs of the following commands:

cat /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
dnf repolist

Perform an upgrade again to make sure you have the latest updates.

sudo dnf upgrade -y --refresh
sudo dnf autoremove

Install Utilities

# install essential CLI utilities and libraries
sudo dnf install \
	git git-lfs gh \
	mc unrar p7zip \
    dmg2img trash-cli tmux \
    openssl inxi wl-clipboard
 
# use full ffmpeg package, if ffmpeg-free is installed
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Install other utilities that I frequently use/nice to have.

sudo dnf install uv tealdeer
uv tool install yt-dlp
uv tool install magika
uv tool install jupyterlab

Ricing Your New System

Prerequisites

I recommend that you use the following customization guides first:

• ZSH
• Neovim (recommended only if you are going to use Neovim as your main text editor in WSL)

Install pfetch and Podman.

curl -Lo ~/.local/bin/pfetch "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Un1q32/pfetch/refs/heads/master/pfetch" && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/pfetch
sudo dnf install podman podman-compose podman-docker