Official GNU Bash support on Windows 10, plus some Linux binaries from Canonical repo

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/be-very-afraid-hell-has-frozen-over-bash-is-coming-to-windows-10/

Double check... nah, it's not April 1st yet.

 

Since Win 8 and now Win 10, I'm not happy with the direction MS is going and been trying to have back up operating system, Ubuntu in particular, just in case Win 7 support expires and Win 10 doesn't do it for me. The plan was to use Win 7 for all the older programs, for security reason without internet access and use Ubuntu for all internet related stuff, like web browsing etc. Apparently MS wants to get out of OS business and is starting to transition people to Ubuntu themselves. I didn't see this coming.

 

The people who would be interested in those features (which are not targeted at regular end users in the consumer/prosumer desktop world) are usually aware of what's available on different sides of the fence, so it's unlikely such support would encourage a significant amount of people to go to the other side and see what they don't already know. If anything, it will discourage people to work cross-platform and adapt Windows exclusive workflows. It's kind of like how Apple provides Windows support to keep people on its hardware.

 

The developer blog post (via phoronix) describes UbuntuOnWindows as like an emulator translating system calls, so the opposite of Wine, integrated into Windows with fast performance. I guess it is emulating application system call APIs, not device driver level, so for example I wouldn't expect to run open source GPU drivers with it, nor X window display servers (though it would be nice if they could provide one). They mention the emacs text editor runs, but I suspect that is in a terminal window with serial cursor control, and no separate windows/icons/menus/mouse-pointers. I assume the file system is still case insensitive and with different protection model. Although many applications don't mind, developers do if they want their code to safely run on OSes outside of Windows. Unlike cygwin, which requires its own binaries recompiled from source, UoW can run application binaries compiled for Ubuntu, so for headless server and command line applications, apt install'ed binaries are likely to run.

 

As a dev, primarily for *nix machines, this is a pretty interesting development and I'm glad to see MS doing something like this as it'd make my job easier (hopefully). Though I'm curious how they will handle the differences in files and file operations (case sensitivity was mentioned above, but what of the differences between forward-slash and back-slash?).

Personally, I find bash (and similar) to be more comfortable to work in than cmd and Powershell, though that's just my two cents.

 

F/B slash isn't a problem because MS file system doesn't allow fslash anyway. They already convert that to bsplash.

Path handling would be different no matter how they do it any 3rd party dev attention is always needed.

 

It isn't interesting in any way other than trying to understand the twisted logic behind it (on both companies' sides) - Cygwin already does almost exactly the same thing.

 

Cygwin is a PITA to set up, relative to just having bash and friends come with the OS.

Actually, I find it easier to just install a Linux VM...

 

Cygwin is pretty simple to install. In fact it's a prerequisite in many college courses these days. Plus you can read and modify its source code.

 

Eh, my college just wants us using Linux directly. Nicer option imo and gives exposure to the non-Windows OS world.