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I have Windows 10 WSL2, I install podman. After installing - podman machine init, Fedora is always installed as default OS in podman

Because, in my opinion, the most stable option for starting the Linux subsystem with podman-compose support - there is only one question left.

How to start a machine with an arbitrary distribution?

We tried to run it like this podman machine init --image docker://docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest But this did not give any results.

Who can tell me?

gzhegow
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1 Answers1

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In 2024 (when the question was asked) podman machine did not support arbitrary base OS images for the virtual machine created with podman machine init.

You could run containers from any image, like Ubuntu:

podman run -it ubuntu:latest bash

And install & use Podman natively in Ubuntu under WSL2 which is probably what the author actually wanted to do.

And as of mid-2025, Podman has introduced enhanced support for initializing machines with custom Linux distributions on Windows using WSL2

podman machine init --image "C:\Path\To\Your\CustomImage.tar.zst"
podman machine start
podman machine ssh
cat /etc/os-release

However it's worth mentioning that after a bit of digging I've realized podman-machine-default is an anti-pattern and I'd recommend avoiding it.

Brian Horakh
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