Submitted by Today, we’re excited to announce that Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux Distro is now available in the Windows Store and can be downloaded and installed on any Windows Insider build >= #16215!
Eventually this will be available to all regular Windows 10 users.
Might be a way for Windows 10 Cloud Edition to run Chrome. 🙂
I’d love to see Stecve Ballmer’s reaction to this!
“Linux! Linux! Linux!” – Throwing Chair Ballmer
It’s not as if they’re advocating that people download it from the Windows Store, install it and run it instead of Windows.
Or even like BeOS 5 Personal Edition, where it executed from within Windows, then rebooted into BeOS.
Edited 2017-07-16 11:55 UTC
i tried it, and combination win + cygwin is still the best for daily work.
Cygwin works completely different from WSFL. Cygwin requires recompilation from source for Windows. WSFL runs the native Linux versions without recompiling.
If you have the sources (not everything that runs on Linux is Open Source!) and don’t mind recompiling Cygwin will probably work better.
whenever someone tells you “I don’t use Store Apps. They are all toy-versions of Win32 programs that only noobs and kids use” the counter is “thank you for agreeing that Linux is only for noobs and kids”
😉
Actually it helps my development a lot. Being able to run a real Linux Shell and Visual Studio at the same time accessing the same files simultaneously. Microsoft really delivered with Windows Subsystem for Linux, basically building something like Wine in a very short period
I have never heard that argument. I mostly hear that they are dirt ugly apps, has limited functionality compared to the “full” application and lack UI consitency.
uhm, I would consider
the same argument.
I have never understood the UI consistency thing. VLC, Windows Media Player, Itunes, WinAmp all are the same class of apllications and look entirely different. I personally think most apps look a lot nicer than most programs. (with apps being store-apps and programs being classic Win32 executables)
Same as For Wine: Extending SHARED use of a Coding Effort -Wherever it’s happening.
Could say it also on money-ese: .gov, .edu, .mil up to a support systems degree.
Edited 2017-07-12 15:21 UTC
Three things really helped there:
1. The Windows NT kernel was designed for this from the start. (Win32 and WSL are pluggable API subsystems, written against a kernel which was originally intended to have Win32, OS/2, and POSIX subsystems for competitive reasons.)
2. Linux is open-source and presents a relatively simple and compact kernel API compared to the massive pile of legacy support Microsoft is carrying around.
3. The entire Ubuntu userland is open-source and licensed in a fashion that allows reuse on top of any kernel.
Microsoft basically pulled ReactOS’s “take Wine’s userland and write adapters” trick, but without being bogged down by having to write a whole new kernel.
(eg. Wine has to reinvent Microsoft’s standard library and the like. Microsoft took advantage of the fact that, in many cases, borrowing Ubuntu’s glibc acted as an abstraction layer, reducing the API surface they needed to replicate.)
Edited 2017-07-12 15:36 UTC
“…written against a kernel which was originally intended to have Win32, OS/2, and POSIX subsystems for competitive reasons.”
Always suspected Microsoft thinker-ed formerly as an ecosystem [still not so sure].
Most of the hate comes from admins / developers that no longer have the ability to block windows store due to company restriction policies (same as disabling One Drive integration with Office 360).
Besides this I do hope Windows Store will get some more love in future. If not for enhanced workflows but just for getting rid of all those separate automatic updates.
This is a massive change for development workflows but also enterprise usgae by those who needed to support linux desktops for devs. Now, give them Win10 and install linux Without breaking support contracts.
Isnt Linux the kernel ?
This is just BASH ..
Id like the full KDE and Dolphin running ontop of NT 🙂
Not as much as I’d like to see Windows(tm) drivers services running atop the Linux kernel.
For lack of a better term, “Linux” has become overloaded to mean both “Linux, the kernel” and “Linux, the ABI that is required for ‘thing X’ to run”.
In the latter sense, the limits of how far “Linux” stretches are fuzzy but normally mean “The Linux kernel, plus anything which can present a glibc-compatible ABI and possibly an X11 server”.
The problem is that, given that fuzziness, I can easily see the Linux kernel requirement being broadened to also include “anything which presents the userland from a genuine Linux distro on top of a Linux-compatible kernel ABI emulation”.
TL;DR: Because “Linux, the execution environment” is so amorphous, I fear the term is going to get diluted to hell and back.
Edited 2017-07-13 16:53 UTC