For many years people have been trying to access CentOS in Microsofts Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).  Looking at the CentOS Board issues, [people have been trying for over four years|https://git.centos.org/centos/board/issue/13.]  The problem was that the WSL tarball had to be put in the Microsoft Store, and there were all sorts of legal issues with this.

Last year, Microsoft changed Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) so that distributions don't have to be in the Microsoft Store to be listed by Windows users, but can be added to the WSL distribution manifest.

The distribution manifest is simply a json list of distributions that have a wsl tarball in a publicly accessible area, along with the hash, name, and a few other pieces of information.  It is very similar to how Vagrant is now doing their images.  It allows users to do

# This shows the distributions listed in the manifest  
$ wsl --list --online
# This installs the distribution listed in the manifest
$ wsl --install <Distro>

Steps to accomplish this - Not everything needs to be done in order

• Permission
  • Centos Board
  • Internally (who?)
• kiwi on CS Koji (CS-2747)
• Kiwi Definitions for creating WSL images
  • Follow Alt Images and Fedora's example
• Put CentOS icon in centos-logos
  • https://gitlab.com/CentOS/artwork/centos-brand/-/issues/3
• Create automation for consistent builds and publishing
  • This needs to be on a long cadence, like 3-6 months, due to the nature of updating the manifest.
• Write SOP for updating the manifest
• Update the manifest
  • Follow Fedora's example: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/pull/12710
• ...
• ...
• Profit  Celebrate!!