Microsoft has partnered with Canonical to bring support for native Bash with access to the Windows file system and open source command line tools in an aim to bring Linux users to the Windows platform. You won’t need third-party tools like Cygwin anymore to run Bash commands. This was announced at the //build 2016 event by Microsoft’s Kevin Gallo.
This is not just Ubuntu running in a virtual machine, there’s no Linux kernel booting in a VM under a hypervisor and it isn’t a container either. It’s just the Ubuntu user space with native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows, says Dustin Kirkland, who is part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Product and Strategy team on the official Ubuntu Insights blog. You’ll be able to download this new feature right from the Windows Store soon and run the ‘Ubuntu on Windows’ like any other application on top of Windows.
A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls. Microsoft calls it their “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. It is not open source currently. “This is a developer-focused release that removes a major barrier for developers who want or need to use Linux tools as part of their workflow,” said Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman.
While it is currently based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be replacing it in the Windows Store soon. Check out the official demo below.
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