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Ubuntu 16.04 Available in Latest Insider Update To Windows 10 (omgubuntu.co.uk)
The latest Windows 10 Insider preview -- build 14936 -- features Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. When a user enables the 'Bash on Ubuntu on Windows' feature for the first time, OMGUbuntu reports, Windows 10 now installs an Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) image instead of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr). From the report: The updated version of Ubuntu in the WSL only affects new instances, i.e., those created by running lxrun.exe /install or on the very first run of the bash.exe setup. It is possible to upgrade WSL instances from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04 manually by running the do-release-upgrade command. Other changes in the WSL in Build 14936 include support for chroot system call, epoll support for /dev/null and the ability for bash -c to redirect to a file.
It's not cygwin-like. Cygwin tries to translate Unix calls to Windows calls, and provides a DLL to link your source code against. WSL actually provides an ELF loader and handles Linux system calls; it runs Linux programs the way a Linux kernel would, albeit the kernel is more of an academic project written from scratch (e.g. FreeBSD or Minix implementing Linux-compatible system calls so as to straight run a Linux userland).
WSL is excellent for those of us in an actual Windows enterprise environment doing Linux system development or administration. It gives a real Unix-like environment with real tools, rather than Cygwin. In general, it's kind of clunky and unpolished; but it's better than Cygwin.
I'd like to see Microsoft release a Winbind-type service that connects (via TCP) to localhost and mediates between the Winbind socket and the local authentication daemon. Otherwise you have to join your computer *and* the Bash shell on your computer to the domain. Would also like to see them implement Docker under WSL tbh.
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A re-paste of a comment I posted as a reply:
My belief is that the 99% use case of this is for running docker images.
Before this you could run docker on windows, but you had to create a "bizarre" tiny linux distro VM (100mb or so storage), and the docker on windows launcher would leverage that to provision and run the docker images. You had to dedicate ram to that VM to run your docker pool.
With this you can run docker images "natively", without a separate VM memory space, and due to the elf loader support they actually are running on windows itself.
I do not see this as a good alternative to traditional VMs.
My Windows boxes at home and work have dual booted since the mid 90s. Even at companies whose software products targeted Windows only. Occasionally a task was better performed under *nix. I also try to separate UI and core code in projects and build/test the core code under both Windows and Linux. Crossplatform builds/testing is a nice way to find some bugs, some bugs are difficult to manifest in one environment and turn out to manifest easily in the other.
Although to be honest the cross platform stuff worked best when I had a Mac around and could also target a completely different architecture, 68K or PPC CPUs back in the day. Admittedly it was easier to get an extra hard drive for Linux than a Mac. Fortunately at some of these jobs we also had Mac products.