Windows 10 Spring Update Improves Linux On WSL With Unix Sockets and More (anandtech.com)

Billly Gates writes: Windows 10 build 1803 has come out this month, but with some problems. AnandTech has a deep-dive with the review examing many new features including the much better support for Linux. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) now has native Curt and Tar from the command prompt as well as a utility to convert Unix to Windows pathnames called WSLpath.exe which is documented here. In addition it was mentioned on Slashdot in the past about OpenSSH being ported natively to Win32 in certain early builds. It now seems the reason was for Linux interoperability with this Spring Update 2. Unix sockets mean you can run Kali Linux on Windows 10 for penetration testing or run an Apache server in the background with full Linux networking support. Deemons now run in the background even with the command prompt closed. [...]

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Differences

[DrYak]

The differences are :

- On Windows, the use of .ini files has completely disappeared. Instead the registry hives being an opaque format that can be only access (in theory) with Windows' API of regedit. This would make it impossible to hand access them manually, say from a boot stick. (Well, in practice, there are 3rd party Linux tools able to access the hive format, so fixing from a boot stick is possible, but you got the idea).

  - In gnome with gconfig the configuration is still stored in sets of plain XML files. Only they are now stored in an organized fashion in a specific set of subdirectories, and there's a centralized API and tool set to access them. But they are still human readable (you could still edit them with your favorite editor - emacs/vim/nano/ed) and easily machine readable (e.g. with your favorite Perl module such as XML::Twig).

The windows equivalent would have been if the .ini were kept, but now Microsoft defined a specific path to store them (e.g.: in a specifc subfolder tree within %USER_PROFILE% or whatever, instead of all over the place like in good old Win 3.x days) and mandated a specific API to manipulate them.

The closest thing to Windows' registry in Linux-land would be journald's internal database format, except that it has a very well documented format and journald forwards messages to any of your favorite system logger as soon as that deamon startsup - and it is configured to do so by default on virtually all the GNU/Linux distributions except for the most storage-starved ones in embed systems (e.g.: mercore/Sailfish OS doesn't have a syslog forwarding setup by default because it has to run on your smartphone limited internal flash. But Raspbian forwards to syslog by default).