Linux Subsystem Files To Become Accessible via Windows File Explorer (zdnet.com)

One of Windows Subsystem for Linux's more annoying tricks is it's hard to get at your Linux files from Windows. From a report: Oh, you can do it, but you take a real chance of ruining the files. To quote Microsoft, "DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify files in your distro's filesystem using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc." In the forthcoming Windows 10 April 2019 Update, aka Windows 10 19H1, this Linux file problem will finally be fixed. According to Craig Loewen, a Microsoft programming manger working on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), "The next Windows update is coming soon and we're bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it! These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line."

Comments

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I could access Windows files on Linux just fine. Some OSs are behind the times I guess.

for what gain really?

[nimbius]

microsoft still hasnt explained exactly what they hope to achieve with the linux subsystem work. namely, what is it you hope to offer of value to something that you could install for free from any of more than 30 cloud providers and hundreds of VPS hosting sites? Who would actively go out of their way to add windows as a layer of complexity, and most importantly, why??

Been able to do this for a decade

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the big deal over WSL? There is nothing that WSL can do that I can not already do with VirtualBox and Putty with X forwarding.

https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

If Microsoft was not so focused on file system incompatibility, it would have supported EXT2,3,4 a long time ago. It also would have made NTFS more easily accessible from Linux. It also would not have encumbered its file systems with patents and extort money from everyone from TomTom to USB manufactures that interact with those systems.

Then again, let's not blame Microsoft, a faceless company. Let's blame the CEO (Ballmer) and all of the minions (Brad Smith) that made this extortion possible.

one way

[geoskd]

Notice that all of these changes to windows are 1 way: They all provide windows access into the linux sub-systems, not the other way around... This is not an accident, and it is not in your best interests

Do not use MS products unless you want to continue your guaranteed lock in as their cash cow. You are the product, you are for sale, but you will not see a dime of the profit.

Re:Cygwin already did better.

[cdwiegand]

Hahaha. Wow... really? you know that WSL comes with full, real distros, like Ubuntu, right? Cygwin still doesn't have a command line way to install packages. No apt-get install anything, or (ugh) rpm -ivh some.rpm. Updates are non-trivial, you have to use a GUI, instead of just do-release-upgrade (or whatever Suse/Redhat/etc. use). Give me WSL any day of the week over Cygwin.