If you’re a Linux enthusiast who uses a Windows machine, chances are you’ve already armed your workstation with WSL. But for folks who haven’t heard of this neat technology, Windows Subsystem for Linux provides a neat way to create Linux environments on your Windows machine without dealing with the performance overhead of a virtual machine or configuring dual-boot settings.

Initially designed as a CLI tool to run Linux apps on Windows, WSL has grown considerably after its second revision. These days, you'll find an array of distributions for WSL, and while most distros may seem similar in a CLI shell, they differ quite a bit in the package managers, system services, stability, and functionality departments. As someone who spends his free time tinkering with different operating systems, I’ve already outfitted the WSL instance of my dev environment with a handful of distros. However, these five distributions stand out from the rest of the WSL offerings.

5 Kali Linux

Just don’t use it as a hacking box

Ask any cybersecurity expert about their OS of choice, and they’d point you to Kali Linux. As the distribution synonymous with hacking and security analysis, Kali Linux houses all the penetration testing, data forensics, and vulnerability assessment tools you could ask for – and the same holds for its WSL instance once you install the Win-KeX package.

While the WSL-based Kali Linux is undoubtedly amazing for newcomers to the cybersecurity domain, I’d suggest limiting your hacking and pen testing projects to personal devices. Since WSL runs on top of your Windows 11 machine, it’s not perfectly isolated. If you try to run a honeypot or other tools that expose your Kali Linux instance to external networks, hackers could use privilege escalation or other vulnerabilities to gain access to your Windows 11 system. So long as you remain cautious, Kali Linux is a fine distro for your WSL adventures.

4 Arch Linux

The easiest way to work with Arch

With its bare-bones design, rolling release cycle, and highly-customizable nature, Arch Linux is far from the most beginner-friendly distribution out there. But if you’re an advanced Linux user, you’ll have a blast tinkering with bleeding-edge packages from the AUR repositories. Now that Arch is available as a WSL2 image, you can even test this powerful distribution on your Windows 11 machine.

Personally, I find the WSL-based instance of Arch Linux the simplest way to tinker with the OS. Rather than fiddling around with menus and options, you can simply execute the wsl --install archlinux command in the terminal and go ham inside the distro once WSL boots into the image.

3 NixOS

All the benefits of NixOS… inside Windows 11

If you find Arch Linux’s customizable nature interesting, you’ll fall in love with NixOS. Between its rollback facility, gigantic Nix repository, and atomic updates, NixOS is a terrific platform for hardcore devs and coding enthusiasts. And that’s before you include the declarative nature of the distribution, where you can configure all your packages and apps just by editing a single config file.

The best part? Thanks to WSL, you can even get NixOS up and running on your Windows workstation. That said, NixOS doesn’t have an official WSL image yet, so you’ll have to go with the community module or import the tar.gz file of the distro inside PowerShell. I’ll admit that it’s far from the ideal distribution for general users. But if you’re already running Linux apps on WSL, chances are you’ll find NixOS a worthy addition to your distro collection.

2 Fedora

The classic Fedora experience

On the other end of the accessibility spectrum, you’ve got Red Hat’s Fedora Project, which combines a neat package manager with a faster release cycle. Plus, it’s not that far off from Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions in terms of stability.

Had I written this article a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have included Fedora. That’s because the Fedora project only recently released the official WSL image, and you previously had to choose the paid Fedora Remix image to access this neat distro on Windows. Plus, my major gripe is that Fedora doesn't have a lot of documentation for the WSL release, which is something I can't say for Ubuntu...

1 Ubuntu

Ideal for a painless setup

Ubuntu is often heralded as the golden standard for Linux distributions, and for good reason. It’s easy to use, fairly stable, and has solid compatibility with most hardware. All that holds true for the WSL version of Ubuntu. Unlike Fedora, you’ll find tons of documentation for running Ubuntu inside WSL – be it troubleshooting tips, beginner guides, or tutorials on enabling complex features like GPU acceleration.

Then there’s the built-in support for snaps. Of course, Canonical’s packaging system has its annoying quirks, but I appreciate that Ubuntu’s WSL image includes snap compatibility out of the box. If I were to begin my Linux journey from scratch, a WSL-based instance of Ubuntu would be my first choice.

But there’s only so much you can do with WSL

Although I’ve installed WSL on my Windows 11 dev environment, I do run VMs for heavy Linux workloads. Since server tools and DevOps projects work better on a full OS, I stick to VMware Workstation Pro (or Proxmox, when I can access my home lab) for tinkering with Linux distributions.