Protip, don't be an idiot and do this.
There are different distributions on it that you can choose from. I'm using Ubuntu, which is what they originally made available. I don't have a dedicated Linux machine that I can use as a node -- I use a Windows machine that I need Windows on for another purpose, hence not being able to move the whole thing over to Linux.
The reason I'm trying to do this is that there's a bug I've been running into on the latest *Windows* build of monerod, causing it to crash, so this is a backup option until that gets fixed, given that the upgrade is happening soon and I can't use a previous version of monerod. So far, it looks like monerod at least functions on Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu).
Based on my testing yesterday on Windows Subsystem for Linux, it was successfully downloading blocks, and I tested connecting a wallet machine through RPC, and that worked.
The only thing I'm not sure on, is whether outside nodes are seeing my node to connect to (my Windows node was working with the port forwarded). This is supposed to work in WSL, but people have run into some bugs with previous versions of it. Based on what I know, it doesn't look like you can open the port per Linux application in Windows Firewall, so you have to open up 18081 for all applications. It does look like monerod is detecting UPnP on the router to run p2p. I'm not sure that the network stack is stable, though, as I just checked, and the node may have dropped all of its seeding connections at some time in the last couple of hours, as it had zero connections and had gotten behind on the block count. At least it's not explicitly crashing like the Windows monerod.exe was. I've restarted it, and it's downloading those blocks now.
WSL creates a mount of the C drive, so, to access the program, as well as if you need to customize any file locations for the blockchain or logs, you just have to use the mounted directory path, as follows. For example, I put the monero binaries in a subdirectory of the default data location, called "monero-linux", for now:
cdmnt/c/ProgramData/bitmonero/monero-linux
./monerod <with all your regular configuration variables>
