Ubuntu now available from the Windows store

This removes one of the major reasons to use a Mac for Linux development. Many people used Macs because they had nice hardware that just works, as well as a Unix (but not Linux) environment. Now, you can buy a Windows laptop and have Windows manage all the tricky bits like power management and graphics while having a bona fide Linux distro for development. Plus, you can also play games :)

For me one very important aspect of Linux is that the OS is decoupled from any kind of &quot;consumer experience&quot;. In other words nothing in the OS is ever asking me:<p>Who I am<p>For Payment Information<p>Would I like to see an Ad<p>Do I need additional products or services<p>So I appreciate that this is handy for some people, but to me it&#x27;s like avocado ice-cream. A bad idea that tastes like crap.

Even clicked the linked articles and never came across a satisfying answer to the question: why? And I mean practical use cases where one would pick WSL over Linux. Once bitten twice shy, I would not hold against them if people were to be skeptical when MS decides to embrace competing products.

Today in &quot;headlines that would have been April Fools jokes ten years ago&quot;

I never quite get developers that don&#x27;t use a system most similar with they <i>deployment target...</i> If I develop web apps intended to run on -nix, I use Linux, if I develop Windows stuff, I use Windows etc.<p>It creates a huge understanding gap that slows you down and makes you miss so many shortcuts...<p>Windows, Macos, Linux are all <i>good enough to get shit done</i> these days... so pick whichever suits current needs best. (I reboot to different OS depending on project since this also helps me avoid my dangerous tendency for multitasking... and productivity&#x2F;office tools are all web apps for me so I can use them anywhere, including phone and tablet).

PSA: filesystem performance in WSL isn&#x27;t great, but it&#x27;s absolutely fantastic under windows&#x27; hyperv hypervisor.<p>As a dev env I run CentOS on hyperv and putty into it, and map the drive with dokan+winsshfs, and it&#x27;s just as performant as Linux&#x2F;Mac on the same hardware

It&#x27;s the 5th result for me (when searching Ubuntu), after a Linux Cheat Sheet, some PasteBin program and WepUpd8 (whatever that may be), then when I click it, the first line says: &quot;This title is powered by great new feature of the windows insider program, please join at...&quot;... Now should I, do I need to do that? The Get button is greyed out, but no indication why (probably because me company hasn&#x27;t approved the anniversary update yet). What a crappy experience.

That&#x27;s a reverse first bug :-).

I just don&#x27;t care anymore - I keep windows on VM it&#x27;s way easier (eg. WSL doesn&#x27;t support docker). I don&#x27;t use any other Windows app except: VS (from time to time) and Word. VirtualBox is more than enough for this (my host linux desktop is beefy machine though)

I have a Linux laptop and a windows laptop. I bought the windows laptop for games and to hobby in game development , blender and unreal engine but I can&#x27;t stand windows even for those basic purposes the popups for updates and other &quot;do you want to set this setting now&quot; when I just quickly want to open a browser and google something drive me nuts. Put notifications in the toolbar in the right with some annoying icon and leave me alone. I know what Linux is doing all the time and if not it&#x27;s easy to look up but windows Microsoft magic makes me feel like I need tons of more security apps than I would like to have running. I need a windows lite.

I just wish the issue with symlinks not being interoperable between Windows and the Linux subsystem (and vice versa) could be fixed.

Microsoft has one problem - it struggles with it being irrelevant.<p>Years after years of shaming from angry penguins did their job. Now Linux is cool and Win is not. Well, Mac is now supposed to be even cooler.<p>Windows can&#x27;t regain even a second place as a development platform unless, ... , it stops being windows. The negative connotation and &quot;uncoolness,&quot; just sticks to anything that remotely touches Microsoft. Unless they can do something like a total market and product production approach U-turn as a company, they can&#x27;t change their trajectory into the dustbin of history.

Doesn&#x27;t this break every policy the app store has about what programs can and can&#x27;t do? This has full system access and every other app is constraint to the file dialog to get write permissions.

Very excited! Been using the WSL for a bit now to do tensorflow and python stuff. Just a bit of tweaking to get it all to work (less than an hour), and I get to dual boot less frequently now.

Never used the Windows Store - do I need to register or can I download Ubuntu without a Microsoft account?

how are file endings handled with WSL? last time I tried using git &amp; sublime text on Windows with some version of cygwin it would checkout a repo with windows file endings, which broke all the bash scripts. if it uses POSIX file endings, how about opening the files with windows applications like VS?<p>Edit: Also, does the windows terminal now have some sane colour scheme? I could never make it work to not show me some completely unreadable colors, like dark blue text on black ground or light yellow on white.

It&#x27;s a bit misleading. Unless you&#x27;re on Windows Insider builds this isn&#x27;t available until the windows 10 fall update.

2017: the year of the Linux desktop.

Is it worth installing Ubuntu via the Windows store or would we be better off running it through VirtualBox?

Is this different from the linux subsystem microsoft already supports? Which is nice, and would,be worthwhile if i had enough motivation to use windows gui programs, but is limited given that you have to jump through an extra hoop to run linux gui programs, and cant even access your linux partitions from it

Did you mean gnu&#x2F;windows?<p>-rms<p>:)

While Windows is in a good place right now, its not great.<p>I have been a Windows guy for a long time but for the past couple of years I have been waiting for the day when I can finally ditch it and move over to a pure <i>nix platform.<p>I want to do this because I understand </i>nix, specifically have worked with Debian for a long time so I am aware of how good the base architecture of Unix-Like OSes are - its that good because it was well thought out from the early days.<p>Being a .NET developer I am literally waiting for the moment when I can unshackle myself from Windows 10.<p>Windows 10 is good, its about as good as we will get with the current bloated architecture and while I suspect the direction the OS will take is to become a VMlike app on a version of &quot;windows-is-linux-not-bash&quot; offering from Microsoft that day is a long way off.<p>Its all the little things that destroy productivity and become major time sinks. Individually we could say they are related to whatever product is causing them but collectively they can seriously eff up your professional working day.<p>MacBook&#x27;s are great, hardware is where Apple really excels and no one can take away the great productivity to be had on the operating system which is based on the awesome BSD but the buy-in is ridiculously expensive.<p>As someone said pound-for-pound we can get better offerings from other vendors which will soften the shitty experience on Windows however what you get with Apple is quality and you can confidently state that you will get a good experience (provided you get good enough Apple hardware).<p>Here is where the problem is, the buy-in is expensive and then you are hurt even more when you realise you need to upgrade to get a better experience later down the line.<p>Conversely we can argue that because the BSD-like OS requires less resources it operates much better for less hardware.<p>I really do hope Windows becomes an &quot;experience&quot; on some BSD&#x2F;Unix like OS that would open up a world of possibilities.

At least they have the decency to call it Ubuntu and not Linux in the promotional material, seeing as it does not contain any Linux kernel code.<p>Personally, I would have called it Line (= Line Is Not an Emulator) or Eniw.

How can I have it run a server in the background&#x2F;after I close the window? (Either that or it already runs in the background)

But can I access to my desktop, documents, music folder and create archives or more folders to development environment?

Its really nice