It's a bit more than just some candy, there's substantial glue on both the Linux/Windows sides to get Plan9, WSLG, and the other components to work.

That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)

>e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2

No longer true since last month.

https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

I'm shocked. They were adamant it wasn't going to happen for a long long time.

The main complaint was the market place TOS that gave Microsoft a free-pass on any trademarked assets. The new WSL2 installation way avoids all of this.

Along with the glibc hacks needed by WSL1.

(I was part of the discussion and also very adamant about this not happening)

Haha yes, I was being cheeky :)

I'm pretty sure that with the opensourcing, we'll see freebsd or more exotic systems popping up quite quickly. Heck, macOS would be fun!

> Heck, macOS would be fun!

Especially in licensing! /sarcasm

That would make it even funnier in my book!