Some additional details from Scott Hanselman:<p><a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...</a><p>"This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me."<p>"This runs on 64-bit Windows and doesn't use virtual machines. Where does bash on Windows fit in to your life as a developer?<p>If you want to run Bash on Windows, you've historically had a few choices.<p>Cygwin - GNU command line utilities compiled for Win32 with great native Windows integration. But it's not Linux.
HyperV and Ubuntu - Run an entire Linux VM (dedicating x gigs of RAM, and x gigs of disk) and then remote into it (RDP, VNC, ssh)
Docker is also an option to run a Linux container, under a HyperV VM
Running bash on Windows hits in the sweet spot. It behaves like Linux because it executes real Linux binaries. Just hit the Windows Key and type bash.
"
Well, this has increased the changes of my next laptop being a Surface Book by around 100%. I already loved the form factor of the thing, but lack of bash was absolutely causing me to hesitate and wonder if I could justify doing all my work in a Linux VM or something (I can't).<p>I'm genuinely very tired of OS X, which (to my perception at least) has gotten steadily worse with every version. I for one will be happy to switch.
Interested in how long it will last this time. Windows NT were POSIX compliant long time ago, but that was discontinued.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX</a>
How about GUI applications?<p>I worked at a place that developed a "Linux on Windows" thingy back in the Windows XP days. It was essentially like WINE. A user-mode Windows program would load the Linux binary into the Windows program's address space and execute it, trapping any attempts by the Linux code to issue system calls, and the Windows program would then service those system calls.<p>For non-GUI stuff this worked remarkably well. I was able to grab the binary for rpm off of my Red Hat system, and the then current Red Hat distribution disc, and install successfully almost all of the RPMs from the disc and have almost all of the non-GUI ones work.<p>I had expected big problems from the case-insensivite vs. case-sensitive filesystem issue, but in practice there were only a handful of things that ran into this. Mostly Perl stuff that used both "makefile" and "Makefile".<p>GUI stuff was another matter. We could run XFree86 under Cygwin, and then the Linux apps under our WINE-like program would work. However management was not keen on the idea of including Cygwin and XFree86 if we turned this thing into a project. Also, we wanted an X server that would fit in better with a mix of X and native Windows apps running at the same time.<p>I spent a while trying to write a Windows X server straight from the official specifications. I got as far as being able to get xcalc to display a window and all the controls to show up right, but weird things happened with events. Everything looked fine when I packet sniffed the communication. I still had not figured this out by the time management decided that this whole thing did not have enough of a commercial market to continue the project.
I wonder if this will mean that Windows will ship a more up to date Bash than OSX!<p>Apple stopped updating Bash in OSX when the upstream license changed from GPL2 to GPL3, I believe. (Fortunately, they keep the bundled zsh more up to date)
This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other Linux tools? Dreamland.
I think eventually, we'll see Windows transform into a Linux distro with a Windows UI.<p>I'm not trying to wrinkle anyone's shorts, but this just makes a lot of financial sense. Let the "community" do most of the OS development and only maintain the Windows UI. This allows them to focus more on services and Azure.
Exciting stuff! This is (very?) similar what with LX branded zones in SmartOS[1][2] -- and, as I've said before[3] -- we want as many other systems as possible take this approach. That said, we also know how long a haul this is, and how detail-intensive it is. So I've got a bunch of questions. ;) First, is the source available? Second, how much of the One Hundred Language Quine Relay[4] runs successfully? (For us, running that sucker to completion was an important early milestone.) Assuming that runs, my next questions are all common apps/programs that we knew to be especially thorny for one reason or another: Go, strace, tcpdump, systemd, etc. Anyway, it's great to see the SmartOS approach so broadly validated by Microsoft -- and hope that they both finish the job and open source it all!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx</a><p>[2] <a href="http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/patrick.mooney/public/talks/surge2015-lx.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/patrick.mooney/public/talks/...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc#t=1h7m15s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc#t=1h7m15s</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/mame/quine-relay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mame/quine-relay</a>
Hell has indeed frozen over, and that's good news! From the screenshots, that actually looks like a proper terminal too.<p>I wonder what will happen to Powershell now.
Sounds like a regression on Canonical's issue #1. The resolution case was "A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.". This article does indeed appear to showcase active work toward a regression on bug #1<p><a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1</a>
To clarify, it sounds like what Microsoft has added to Windows 10 is a Linux ABI.<p>This has been done before with other x86 OSes: FreeBSD has had 32-bit ABI compatibility for at least a decade (<a href="https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html</a>), and the "lx branded zone" for Solaris also has 64-bit support (<a href="https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/817-1592/gchhy/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/817-1592/gchhy/index.ht...</a>).<p>It looks like Ubuntu was the first to package some Linux binaries for Windows. I guess that's useful?
I know I've run bash on Windows before -- but I don't remember if it was with or without Cygwin. I assume this announcement is running bash natively, without Cygwin or anything VM-like.<p>Did they have to contribute patches to bash, or just install it by default? I don't see anything on the bash mailing list, but the development is not particularly open.
Very interesting and great to hear, though I would prefer zsh or fish. Didn't they fix their command window (terminal) too?<p>Recently, MS is making all the right moves technically, but they've also doubled down on the spying, pushing W10 without consent, and still in bed with NSA, so they are still out of consideration for me.<p>A shame really. :(
I am sick and tired of Linux hardware support. Looking at what I run on a Linux GUI, there's nothing which actually is Linux specific (right now I have Skype, Slack, Konversation, shutter, phpstorm, geany, Chrome and Firefox running). If I am able to run the Linux LAMP stack then I will be happy to ditch all the problems with battery life, video drivers and bluetooth and just use Windows. This stuff here is really big.
This might actually stop the exodus to OSX ive seen in the developer community.<p>And I'm kind of surprised Microsoft did this since they seemed to be pushing for Powershell before the Windows 10 release.
<a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...</a><p>Some more info on this
It's interesting to see Microsoft move their OS more and more in sync with Linux/OSX. Maybe they should invest in a Linux kernel based OS and build a compatibility wrapper on top of that instead?
What about file permissions? If I can develop on a native IDE running on Windows and share files with a Linux VM (or anything running Docker) without screwing up file permissions, then I'm on.
Amazing. Can't tell you how many times we've asked Microsoft for a better shell like linux. Or how many times we've said (half-jokingly) that Microsoft should just give up and use a more unix-y file system and swap out the kernel for linux.<p>This all not to say that Microsoft tech in these low level areas don't have advantages over linux or are bad, but it'd be nice to have it at a low level.
Oh, another subsystem. Yay, good for Microsoft. The problem with the subsystem approach is that it's hard to get programs running in the subsystem to interact with the desktop world, which is win32. What I like about Cygwin is that the programs that run under it <i>are</i> win32 programs: they can equally well use CreateWindow and ppoll. Cygwin programs understand NT permissions.<p>It's always been possible to run Linux programs under Windows: just run a VM. What Microsoft has done here makes it less painful to run Linux programs, sure, but these programs still exist in their own little world. Cygwin programs, on the other hand, <i>are</i> Windows programs. To me, that makes them much more useful.<p>Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the new Linux subsystem is more tightly integrated with the rest of the system than I'm guessing. But based on the available documentation, it looks a lot more like SFU or Interix than it does Cygwin, and that's a shame, because if I'm right, Microsoft misunderstood the whole <i>point</i> of Cygwin. Again.
Project Janus reloaded? AFAICS it's the same approach. Some shim layer that translates between Linux kernel API and native Windows API. <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/suns-solaris-10-to-run-linux-apps-too/#" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/news/suns-solaris-10-to-run-linux-apps-t...</a>!
I think this will be met VERY VERY badly by readers of this comment but
this change as far as i understand is windows telling canonical to help them in taking their customers
i live in egypt and other than containers and CLI and running it as webservers there is practically no way for anyone to even consider using linux i don't think this will end up well for linux
i think windows attempts will take the webservers business from linux in 5 years or something which is probably 90% of it
A lot has been written, in this and the other major Hacker News discussion, about Microsoft. Very little has been written about Canonical. Another ZDNet news piece (<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-not-linux-on-windows-how-it-works/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-not-linux-on-windows-how...</a>) quotes in part a Mark Shuttleworth press statement that is on the Ubuntu WWW site in full (<a href="http://partners.ubuntu.com/microsoft" rel="nofollow">http://partners.ubuntu.com/microsoft</a>).<p>Another thing that no-one has mentioned at all is how this pairs up with UbuntuBSD.<p>* <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326457" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326457</a><p>Michael Hall of Canonical is quoted elsewhere (<a href="http://www.cio.com/article/3046588/open-source-tools/ubuntubsd-helps-users-escape-systemd.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cio.com/article/3046588/open-source-tools/ubuntub...</a>) saying that<p>> <i>I think it's a cool project and I'm looking forward to seeing how far they get with it. It would certainly be an interesting addition to our already varied list of official flavors, if they can get there.</i><p>If one has Ubuntu binaries, one can now run them directly on top of 3 operating system kernels:<p>* On the FreeBSD kernel, with UbuntuBSD.<p>* On the Linux kernel, with Ubuntu Linux.<p>* On the Windows NT kernel, with this new Windows NT Linux subsystem.<p>So whilst RedHat is busy pushing systemd, and the systemd people are busy pushing a convergence of all Linux distributions into systemd operating systems that do a whole lot of things in the same single way, Ubuntu is apparently taking on Debian's "universal operating system" mantle and extending it to places where even Debian is not.<p>Everyone is focussing on Microsoft. It's important to remember the "and Canonical".
I think this is great. I live in emacs and a bit of bash. emacs on windows works, but, does not <i>feel</i> right. Everything is a little wonky (the path slash thing, the unix find and aspell tools etc). If this makes emacs feel like it does on linux native or mac, I will seriously consider buying a windows laptop. Well done new guy in charge of Microsoft!
I'd be more excited if they added support for NFS to every edition of Windows and fixed some quirks that is has.<p>Bash alone isn't that useful, you'd need other stuff and you can already get that from other sources. There's also a distinction between a terminal program and shell. Bash is a shell. iTerm2 is a terminal program. Cmd.exe is both?
I know I'm being picky, but there's NO Linux here. Linux is the kernel, and the kernel is THE piece they're not including.<p>So rather than repeating "Linux on windows", this is "Ubuntu's userland on windows", or "GNU on windows", or any other variation, but NOT "Linux".
Cool! The *nix/Windows ecosystems coming closer can only be a good thing. I've hesitated in getting a Surface Book since it'd always need a good network connection to support remote development, but this has the potential to change the game.<p>I had always hoped this would happen when I was younger, and now it's finally here.
FYI, <a href="http://aka.ms/uowterms" rel="nofollow">http://aka.ms/uowterms</a> points to Canonical's site.<p>Pretty excited about this, given that I've been using Cygwin for ages and always found it a pain to hit those edge cases where it didn't work.
This is awesome. My guess, is that they will also integrate building Linux applications with Visual Studio. See <a href="https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/18/announcing-the-vs-gdb-debugger-extension/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/18/announcin...</a><p>for an example of how to debug using gdb in Visual Studio. Having an integrated Linux environment, would make this support seamless. Then Visual Studio becomes the cross-platform hub for building code for Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Interesting, as a rails dev who develops mainly on vim, the main reason I've switched to an MBP from a Thinkpad was because of this.<p>Will reconsider a windows laptop again next, if build quality and battery life are comparable.
This was possible few years ago on x86 win XP.<p><a href="http://www.colinux.org/?section=home" rel="nofollow">http://www.colinux.org/?section=home</a><p>I guess it's possible to do something like this again.
Another item on the Apocalypse is coming list is checked.<p>On a more serious note - Unity is something I deeply hate, and a lot will depend on the quality of the implementation.<p>It will be good to develop easily for linux too.
Sounds like this is an experiment to me - the first step towards a hybrid OS. Do they want to try and eat into the OSX/development stack in an effort to make windows relevant to that market? Or is there a bigger picture here where they eventually want to blur the lines between linux and windows? Perhaps they will "pull an android" on the patent front but have a free alternative that you can use. I guess I've been around too long and seen too much.
Not sure what the best URL is for this story, so we just picked the oldest active thread. We can change the URL if there's a significantly better one.
Not surprised. Seems that as of late the biggest use of Ubuntu is as a container base.<p>If there is one thing Microsoft has always delivered, it is strong developer tools. And this is another case, as developers now don't have to fiddle with a VM to get a Ubuntu test environment going before stuffing things into a container.<p>Every embrace of Linux Microsoft has been doing as of late can be traced back to their Azure cloud service.
Will this work on Windows Phone?<p>It would seem like this compatibility layer goes some of the way to running Android apps on WP10.<p>But it might be handy to have a GNU/Linux distro in your pocket, coupled with Continuum, running inside a chroot.<p>(sure there's debian chroots on Android. There's Ubuntu Touch but I've never seen a retail handset, whereas Lumias do exist.)
"According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, and Microsoft, you'll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10." I'm not a native english speaker, but that seems like a poorly phrased sentence, isn't it? (I'm currently reading "Eats, shoots and leaves")
A lot of bash already exists in the "git bash" shell that comes with the git Windows installation [1].<p>I've been using it for a while now for a lot of non-git stuff too and I'm quite happy with it.<p>[1] <a href="https://git-for-windows.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://git-for-windows.github.io/</a>
Real question: why are users considered "hard core" just because they run bash commands from a CLI?<p>It's such a strange though to me, the idea of being a sys admin and clicking around in a Windows computer... is that how it happens, or do most Windows admins use one of the CLI tools mentioned in the article?
So a bunch of CLI tools, that use a shim layer to translate Linux syscals to Windows kernel API. I think this will be somewhat like OS X's POSIX base. I'm dreaming this could mean eventually being able to run KDE or openbox or sth, perhaps by community effort.
Actual tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/windowsdev/status/715211234702966785" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/windowsdev/status/715211234702966785</a><p>No much information for now, but that seems to be a little revolution.
All I wanted was a win32-subsystem COW fork. NT already had a COW fork. It always has. All you needed to do was wire up that fork to win32. Instead, you did some other random, much less valuable thing.
I'm on Win8, haven't updated to Windows 10. Will this /only/ work on Win10? I really don't want to update -- but will update if it's the only way.
> It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.<p>I will love it but not having a graphical interface limits the added value. Currently the main problem with running a desktop Linux in a VM is the limited support for 3D/2D that increased CPU usage making your whole computer unusable.<p>On the server side Hyper-V in Windows 10 is a partial solution that already works.
So they've reintroduced Services for UNIX Applications?<p>This isn't news. This is Microsoft up to the same dirty tricks they pulled in the 90's to try to kill UNIX.
This post has more details <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-canonical-partner-to-bring-ubuntu-to-windows-10/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-canonical-partner...</a><p>The interesting part is "Ubuntu will primarily run on a foundation of native Windows libraries."<p>If this is true Canonical is playing with fire. That could be the embrace step of the usual embrace-extend-estinguish script. Think what happens when Microsoft adds some new functionality to those "native Windows libraries" and Ubuntu/Windows is extended to use it and Ubuntu/Linux obviously not. If (when?) the majority of Ubuntu's users will be on Windows Microsoft only needs to start developing its own Ubuntu and cut Canonical out of the loop. If there will be a significant amount of Ubuntu/Windows servers by then, very little will be left for Canonical. Only the cost of Windows licenses can save Canonical on the server. The desktop will be lost given that most of Ubuntu's desktops are born as Windows machines. The more convenient way will be to add Ubuntu/Windows to them and keep a Windows OS for games or just in case you need some Windows native application.<p>Maybe Canonical is thinking about leaving the desktop and focusing on the server. Still it's a risky move.<p>Another interesting post of October 2015 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ubuntu-conspiracy" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ubuntu-conspiracy</a> "The word is that Microsoft is in secret negotiations to purchase Canonical." Maybe they're playing the Elop move without having to change CEO.