Windows 10 to include an Linux-style package manager

Windows 10 will come with a command line package manager, much to the lament of Linux users | ExtremeTech

My thoughts: I'm actually feeling less compelled to dual-boot linux now, hopefully if i can port over some of my CLI tools to Windows....

 

Well well well, you might want to hold your horses here: This is only for "Windows Store Apps", which nobody is interested in anyway.

 

Can you use it with a local, non-Microsoft Windows account? That, as well as support for regular desktop applications, would be the two prerequisites for me to be interested.

I'm not sure it would be a good thing, though. IMO one of the strengths of Windows, Linux, and to a lesser extend OS X is the decentralized nature of distribution. Yes, you can't blindly trust any old .exe on the Internet, but it results in a large variety of programs from many sources with easy distribution. There's no walled garden like on iOS. This could be another small step towards implementing something like Gatekeeper on OS X. On its own, it's a good option, but it could lead to worse options, and even as-is it could lead to situations like how on Linux, if something isn't in the package manager, not very many (regular) users are ever going to find it.

 

What does this have anything to do with anyone not wanting to run Linux anymore. I don't understand.

 

Yes, I may have misread this one.

As an aside, what command-line tools do you need? Given that you can run any Unix shell you like on Windows (e.g. through Cygwin), most of your command-line tools should be portable with no issues, unless they require Unix-internal OS features (the typical helpers like grep, more (or less), awk, sed, etc. are likewise available and work just fine). Plus, Powershell provides a command line environment that easily matches the capabilities of most Unix shells, but of course using that power would require some serious re-coding.