Microsoft Open Source Tool Lets You 'Bring Your Own Linux' To Windows (microsoft.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes: Debian is now available in the Windows app store. It joins Ubuntu, Suse Leap, SuSe enterprise, and Kali Linux for those who cannot or do not want to bother with a virtual machine or a full install of the OS. However, it included stable 9.3. 9.4 is available from the repository if you run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
"Fedora is not yet available, although Microsoft has stated openly that it is working to make it so," reports Computer Weekly. And there's more: Microsoft has also provided an open source tool called Microsoft WSL/DistroLauncher for users who want to build their own Linux package where a particular distribution is either a) not available yet or b) is available, but the user wants to apply a greater degree of customisation to it than comes as standard.

Comments

Well Linux is over

[Anonymous Coward]

What next?

TempleOS anyone? /ducks

Re: Well Linux is over

[saloomy]

Hah. Let me know when I can

yum install ms-windows-x86_64

It would be nice if your could do it backwards.

Linux with added spyware

[Alain Williams]

sorry, I should have said 'Telemetry' !

I wonder if this was at the behest of the NSA who were worried about spy-ware free Linux boxen; this lets the keep tabs on more people.

Re:Linux with added spyware

[Gavagai80]

MS can't possibly lose from being able to say their product can do everything their competitors can, including running those competitors for free. The "best of both worlds, no risk" argument is just what business wants to hear. And any home user who bothers to figure out WSL is someone who was likely to have tried dual-booting anyway so they can only gain there too.

On Windows?

[Gravis Zero]

Eh... I'll wait for the Linux port. ;)

Missing Linux Feature: Seamless OS Crossing

[rea1l1]

I'd really appreciate the ability to switch between OSes like I can virtual desktops. Modern hardware certainly supports this potential.

I hope someone within the Linux community returns with a competing feature, enabling a seamless OS transition, founded upon Linux, an OS that doesn't invade your privacy, while eventually providing additional sand boxing & integration features around Windows, locking it into it's own little garden.

Could an authentic Microsoft Windows installation be forced into becoming a mere compatibility layer built on top of Linux?

The best of both worlds: Windows compatibility coupled with Linux security.

Re: Missing Linux Feature: Seamless OS Crossing

[cyber-vandal]

Windows 10 has virtual desktops

Permissions?

[BronsCon]

Have they fixed permissions mapping when accessing files on the Windows partition yet? If so, I'm excited for the update, because it's an issue I deal with daily.

Their excuse is that they don't want to change Windows ACLs, and that's fine, I get that, but it's a poor excuse; WSL applies 0777 to all Windows files currently and, to add to it, doesn't seem to use Windows ACLs for the files within the lxss directory, which strongly implies that they're already storing Linux file permissions as metadata elsewhere, which is what they should be doing for Linux file permissions for Windows files -- defaulting to values mapped from Windows ACLs, of course.

Re:Permissions?

[BronsCon]

No more than Microsoft's response makes them come off as a bunch of assholes, but okay Yours makes you seem like a swell guy, though.

Re:Permissions?

[BronsCon]

windows mapped drives are using the ACLs granted to your windows user access token when launching the shell

Indeed they are, as you're still technically signed in as your Windows user, so you can only access what your Windows user can access, regardless of how you're accessing it. WSL still shows permissions of 0777 for all Windows mapped drives and all files and directories contained therein, regardless of your actual permissions. I'm not guessing at this; as I said, this is an issue I deal with on a daily basis. I can chmod those files all day long and the operation will appear to succeed, but when I list them they're all still 0777, regardless of the permissions I set or the permissions granted by Windows ACLs.

That is the problem, and it's a big one considering that Git stores whether a given file is user executable or not. Semi-fortunately, Git has a configuration option that tells it to ignore that and either make any new files executable or not executable (based on the configured value), but that does make it a bit difficult to add a new file with an executable status other than the configured default. Yes, I know about "git update-index", but I work on a multitude of different systems, only one of which is WSL, and it's honestly a massive pain in my ass to have to remember to do that if I happen to be adding a new executable to a repo while I'm on that system.

If you look at the number of people complaining about this on Github, I'm far from the only person who thinks they should, at the very least, default the Linux permissions that are displayed to something that reflects the Windows ACLs that are applied. Windows ACLs include "Read & execute", so doing this would allow me to solve my problem natively.

To clarify, a file for which my Windows user has no permissions, e.g. I can not open, edit, write, execute, or delete that file, appears in WSL to have full permissions -- 0777. That, again, is the problem. Attempting to access the file, of course, will fail in that case, but you don't know it will fail until you try it.

And things that shouldn't be executable are executable in Windows mapped drives in under WSL, because they all appear to have a permissions mask of 0777; if your Windows user can read it, your WSL user will happily execute it. Really not good if the file in question happens to be a potentially malicious binary or BASH script you copied off one of your servers or other systems for analysis (in which case, best practices dictate you "chmod -x" that sunuvabitch so you don't accidentally execute it). Whoops, can't do that in WSL if the file happens to reside on a Windows mapped drive. Again, that's the problem.

Open source is cancer.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

That is what Microsoft said. Looks like the cancer has metastasized and spread to the brain!

And why would I want that?

[gweihir]

Windows is becoming less and less usable and more and more unstable. The only applications left that really need it are MS office (because too many other people use it) and games. I am currently preparing a move of everything besides these two to Linux, because I pretty much have had enough. Spying, always changing GUI, bad features, insecurity, and general stupidity, arrogance and greed. MS really is in rapid decline. They were evil and incompetent before, but now they try very hard to top that. Yes, I am aware "Linux is user friendly, but it is selective about who its friends are", but fortunately I am not one of the masses that have to eat whatever dog-food MS gives them and I am quite capable to run Linux without the MS like atrocity that systemd is.

Re:Slowly letting users get used to linux

[jellomizer]

The WSL is more for people who want Windows as a primary OS but would like a few random Linux goodies and tools. Cigwin and the like work too. But they haven’t been kept up to date at the same level as a popular Linux distribution.

Does no one remember Microsoft's 3 E's?

[geekprime]

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish",[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Corporate IT is hostage to Windows

[raymorris]

> Spending time & effort to find a way to run Linux distros inside Windows is like struggling to find a way to mount an Abrams tank on top of a Mini-Cooper.
> What's the point outside of a few edge-cases where it may possibly be helpful/convenient?

For the user, the point is that for 20 years Microsoft's strategy was to ensure vendor lock-in for corporate IT environments. A lot of companies therefore issue Windows desktops and won't provide Linux desktops. Microsoft did a pretty good job of making it difficult for large corporations to use anything but Windows because of all the inter-related proprietary stuff. An organization can easily run Windows or not run Windows, but if the company chose Windows it's been hard to add a few Linux desktops to the mix. Partially because everyone in corporate IT knows the Microsoft way of doing things, not cross-platform standards.

I can be FAR more productive using Linux than Windows. Now, I can continue to use Linux, on the Windows desktop issued by corporate headquarters.

different package name

[DrYak]

That package might be called "wine" or "VirtualBox" in yoir distro~~

WSL vs Cygwin

[DrYak]

noy exactly Cygwin

Cygwin boils down to a Windows DLL library that exposes POSIX compatible interfaces against which you can recompile source code (you can recompile Gimp for Windows). But you can't run any Unix binary un-modified.

WSL is the NT kernel exposing(*) barely enough Linux APIs so that (a few, very simple) Linux ELFs can run unmodified on Windows.
(it's a *realy tiny* subset of Linux kernel's API. so forget about running anything complex like FUSE, other file systems, Docker/LXC/etc, X11 or Wayland, complex network filtering, ...)
Target public are mostly devs who would want to quickly test a compiled executable before deploying to the actual server, but don't want to bother setting up a whole VirtualBox VM.

---
(*): NT Kernel has this weird multiple personality disorder, were it can expose entirely different APIs.
That used to be used by Microsoft to enable support for OS/2 applications, back in th early days.
Recently, Microsoft had hoped to miraculously keep Windows 10 Mobile relevant on the smartphone market by tapping into the big Android system by making it able to run apps. That proved too complex and failed miserably. WSL is what they managed to salvage out of the failure, and to repurpose as a dev's testing tool to run ELFs.

Re:WSL vs Cygwin

[thegarbz]

(it's a *realy tiny* subset of Linux kernel's API. so forget about running anything complex like FUSE, other file systems, Docker/LXC/etc, X11 or Wayland, complex network filtering, ...)

It is also highly feature incomplete and still being developed. So while you're right, I expect your post may be less right as time progresses.

Microsoft's revenue numbers disagree with you

[raymorris]

Here are some revenue numbers quoting directly from Microsoft's audited annual report:

---
          Office commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 10% (up 10% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 41% (up 41% in constant currency) ...
Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue decreased 4% (down 5% in constant currency)
---

Office 365 up 41%, Windows down 5â.... Those are the numbers.

Active Directory etc

[raymorris]

Microsoft provides a big network system, with Active Directory at the center. Active Directory is a database for storing user information, a configuration management system, a DNS server, an email server, and about 20 other things. It interacts with a bunch of other products using Microsoft proprietary protocols. If a company buys into the Microsoft network plan, where Active Directory is the central brain of everything, it can be a hassle to use any non-Microsoft products anywhere in the network.

If, on the other hand, you build your network using standard network protocols, you can easily have Windows, Mac, Linux, Cisco, and Android devices, all talking to each other.