2026-06-16

Exherbo Linux on the Microsoft Store

Dev log — back to all posts

Exherbo Linux on the Microsoft Store

Exherbo Linux is now a one-click install on the Microsoft Store as a WSL2 distribution. Search "Exherbo Linux WSL" on the Store, or visit the listing directly.

This is the first of four planned WSL distributions hitting the Store. Exherbo went first because it has a loyal user base and had no existing Store presence. Three more in the pipeline: Chimera Linux (musl + LLVM + dinit), Gentoo, and a polished Fedora release that addresses the issue-tracker pain in the existing Fedora Remix for WSL.

What's inside

The MSIX wraps Microsoft's official WSL-DistroLauncher template (MIT licensed) with the upstream Exherbo -current.tar.xz stage pulled from stages.exherbo.org and sha256-verified at build time via the .sha256sum sibling URL. Nothing third-party in the rootfs.

The launcher does the standard WSL OOBE — creates a wheel-group user, runs passwd interactively, drops you into bash. /etc/wsl.conf ships hardened: noexec on /mnt/c and appendWindowsPath=false so the Linux PATH stays clean.

After install, cave sync and you're running source-based Exherbo on Windows.

Build pipeline

Three PowerShell scripts and a thin C++ launcher:

The full source is at github.com/t3m3d/exherbo-wsl-store (MIT). Same pattern is used for the three sibling distros — each swaps the rootfs URL, the OOBE specifics (cave for Exherbo, emerge for Gentoo, apk for Chimera, dnf for Fedora), and the launcher identity.

Privacy

No telemetry, no analytics, ever. Full privacy policy here.

If you don't want a Store account

The same distro is also available via a PowerShell installer at github.com/t3m3d/exherbo-wsl2-installer.