The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  Microsoft has been trying to extinguish their competition for decades now; what makes you think they&#x27;re going to be different this time?

There is no &quot;New Kinder Gentler Microsoft&quot;. Corporations just do what they see as more profitable. They do not make decisions based on morality per se, but they try to maintain a certain public image when it helps profits.

1. Embrace is good.2. Extend can be good if done openly and collaboratively, as opposed to closed and hidden.3. Extinguish - Here be dragons.I&#x27;m hopeful the New Kinder Gentler Microsoft stays on steps 1. and 2. (done collaboratively).

Indeed. Perhaps it will increasingly make sense to design software for Linux and then run it on windows via this method.  Over time the Windows system calls that are not needed by the linux overlay can be phased out.

I came here to make the same comment.Its ironic (old)microsoft exerted so much effort to put the personalities in place (OS&#x2F;2, posix etc), then (mid)microsoft systematically destroyed that work under Balmer, and now (new)microsoft are reimplementing the same thing under a (seemingly) completely different system.

&gt;Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it.I was interested in that too, since I write Unix utilities and it is sometimes useful to have them work on Windows as well. I&#x27;ve done that (checked that it worked on Windows) with a few utilities in the past (written in C), that did not use any very Unix specific features that were not present on Windows. And remember reading around that time that Windows (I think it was from NT onwards) had a POSIX subsystem.Then more recently, as in, a few months ago, I wanted to check that out again, and did. IIRC I read (maybe on a Wikipedia page) that the POSIX subsystem is not present in Windows any more.

From elsewhere in this thread:&quot;Windows NT was designed from the start to have modular subsystems. It was most infamously used to provide a POSIX subsystem which really only checked boxes on government acquisition forms. :-)&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11391290" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11391290</a>

Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it. The NT Kernel was designed to have different personalities like Win32, OS&#x2F;2, POSIX, etcIt could be an updated version.

Totally doable.  Use KVM to virtualize Windows and (the important part) make sure your CPU and motherboard support VT-d.  Then you can pass a graphics card (separate from the one you run Linux with, naturally) to the VM and get &gt;95% of native performance.  There&#x27;s lots of videos of folks doing this.

The problem is that the user-base for Windows on Linux probably isn&#x27;t worth Microsoft&#x27;s time...While it seems like it is worth Microsoft&#x27;s time to keep people on Windows.I for one look forward to having all my vulnerabilities in one place... Linux, windows, server, desktop...

I cannot possibly imagine a world where Microsoft cannibalizes their Windows Server sales by creating a Windows Emulation Layer for Linux.Crossover is probably the best you&#x27;ll get: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codeweavers.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;crossover-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codeweavers.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;crossover-linux</a>Otherwise, if you only need Windows to game, I&#x27;d highly suggested PCI Passthrough so that you can use your GPU in a Windows VM: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...</a>

I also would&#x27;ve expected more demand for the opposite. I don&#x27;t see myself ever switching back to Windows, but I&#x27;d pay $$$ to have Microsoft Project fully supported on Linux. I have more than a few colleagues who would be interested in the rest of the Office suite too, but who make do with LibreOffice because other things on Linux are more important.

I would rather have the opposite.  I would even pay for an official &quot;Windows on Linux&quot;.   There is a handful  of games I would like to play, but other than that I have no interest in windows.

Thats why you do it clean room style.One team to document, one team to implement based on that document.

&gt;Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-sourceMore correctly would be to say that Microsoft has advantage of user space libraries used in GNU&#x2F;Linux distributions being open-source. Linux kernel itself being GPL2 is probably a problem for Microsoft&#x27;s developers because of possibility to be accidentally exposed to it while researching documentation.

*BSD and Solaris have done have run linux binaries for years. Doing it on Windows is a bit more impressive, but given that there is a POSIX subsystem, its not all that surprising.I didn&#x27;t see any information about whether they do it using direct system call translation, or if they do it using shared library inter-positioning. In either case, its pretty cool!

&gt; I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system callsFreeBSD has been able to do this (with some limitations!) for years:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;linuxemu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;linuxemu.html</a>

”It was most infamously used to provide a POSIX subsystem which really only checked boxes on government acquisition forms.”Ah, so that was the rationale. I always found that subsystem curious.

IIRC, this is how the Linux binary compat on BSD works.

Also (c) Windows isn&#x27;t open source so there are licensing issues with Wine shipping actual Windows DLLs. Some of them do work under Wine but the project aims to replace as many of them as possible with emulated versions.

This makes it seem that the POSIX subsystem only ever did that, which is not true at all. A better statement is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11392369" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11392369</a> .

Windows NT was designed from the start to have modular subsystems. It was most infamously used to provide a POSIX subsystem which really only checked boxes on government acquisition forms. :-)The reason WINE went with the library emulation route is because: (a) the Windows kernel doesn&#x27;t have a stable system call layer, and (b) the Win32 API is massive anyway.Windows has an easier time emulating Linux at the very lowest levels because Linux has an ABI stable system call layer. If you emulate those, you can run ANY Linux binary.It also means Microsoft doesn&#x27;t have to ship or support hundreds of Open Source projects. They ship the syscall layer, and distributions ship the user layer.

I used to use your program on my XP box a while back... I told an MS exec about it and he seemed really impressed. It would be funny if they got some of the core ideas for this from LBW.

That &quot;big pile of key-value strings pushed onto the stack above the environment&quot; is auxv. You can see it in the binary &#x2F;proc&#x2F;*&#x2F;auxv files. It&#x27;s generated by the kernel&#x27;s ELF loader.

Given that Interix is not being brought back from the dead ...* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11391841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11391841</a>... would you agree with a call for it to be?

So, uh. I did this! Crudely. In 2010.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cowlark.com&#x2F;lbw&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cowlark.com&#x2F;lbw&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s a Linux syscall translator for Windows. It works well enough to run a Debian userland, although it&#x27;s got so many holes and rough edges that I would never, ever, ever suggest using it for anything other than a stunt.It uses Interix to do most of the heavy lifting, so all LBW does is to translate from Linux syscalls to Interix syscalls; so we get a Unix filesystem and user permissions and sockets and fork etc for free. (Interix was great. I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re bringing it back from the dead.) Unfortunately not all the system calls directly map onto each other; so Interix has a native fork(), but Linux emulates with clone(). I couldn&#x27;t make threads work.A few of the biggest problems were:- the Windows page size is 64kB; the Linux page size is 4kB. The ld.so loader will try to map two bits of executable within the same 64kB boundary, and, of course, this doesn&#x27;t work on Windows. I crudely hack around it by allocating pages of RAM and copying things. Write-back mapping only works at all if the application lets mmap() pick the address.- very very very different register usage. glibc on Linux uses gs as a &#x27;pointer&#x27; to the current thread&#x27;s private data area, via a special syscall. Windows resets gs to 0 on every interrupt! I crudely hack around this by intercepting null pointer dereferences, looking at the instruction to see if it was gs, and then reloading it with the right value.- even then, that syscall sets gs to point at a GTD segment with a size of 2^32; this wraps round the entire address space, which allows very large offsets in gs to be treated as negative numbers. Windows doesn&#x27;t let you create GTD segments. It only allows LTD segments, and it caps the segment limit to the end of the user address space, so this trick won&#x27;t work. I crudely hack around this by intercepting segmentation violations, looking at the instruction to see it it&#x27;s a [gs+negative number] dereference, and then binary patching the executable to use a different instruction.- glibc is horrible and undocumented. There&#x27;s a big pile of key-value strings pushed onto the stack above the environment when the process is initialised, containing various magic numbers. ld.so will just crash if you get this wrong. I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the ld.so source code to figure out what these were and how to set them up.It was all vile and horrible, but it worked surprisingly well (i.e., it worked, which was surprising).Using the NT kernel&#x27;s personality system to implement Linux syscalls natively is totally the right thing to do; that&#x27;s obviously what they&#x27;re doing here.I would love to know about the internal Microsoft politics which made releasing this possible. I wonder how long it&#x27;s been brewing? I did LBW in about a month of evenings; the core logic wasn&#x27;t hard. I wouldn&#x27;t be at all surprised if this hasn&#x27;t been floating about inside Microsoft for years.

&gt; This feels eerily similar to the OS2 story and no doubt in the next week I expect to see more than a few articles discussing this very thing.Although, as others have already pointed out, it differs in some very significant ways.OS&#x2F;2 2.x providing Win16 binary compatibility was an after-market system providing binary compatibility with applications made for the operating system that shipped &quot;out of the box&quot;. Whereas this is the operating system that ships &quot;out of the box&quot; providing binary compatibility with applications made for an after-market operating system.(Yes, yes. One could buy OS&#x2F;2 pre-installed, and one can buy Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. The scale of that, in both cases, is nowhere near significant enough to change the basic fact that overall the two situations are the reverse of each other.)Also: There was not the extent of existing tools available natively on both platforms, in the OS&#x2F;2 case. The examples being waved around in the news now are things like Apache, Ruby, Node, and so forth. There wasn&#x27;t the OS&#x2F;2-and-Win16 analogue of (say) the Ruby developers deciding in the months to come that a Win32 port is too hard to maintain, and dropping it in favour of just running the Linux Ruby on the Windows NT Linux subsystem. Today&#x27;s analogue of the OS&#x2F;2 case would be a universe where there was no Win32 Ruby at all, and the Ruby developers deciding not to start making a Win32 version because the Linux one &quot;is good enough for the few Windows users&quot;.I suspect that drawing parallels based upon what happened with OS&#x2F;2 2.x and Win16 is a mistake, and those thinking that this will mean an outflux of Windows development &quot;because it happened with OS&#x2F;2 2.x&quot; (which was more like an influx of development that failed to happen) are indulging in wishful thinking.There&#x27;s also the minor matter that, during the OS&#x2F;2 2.x and Win16 time, there was this little thing called Windows NT lying around, promising a route for OS&#x2F;2 1.x, where the existing tools were, with its OS&#x2F;2 subsystem. (It is ironic that we are once again looking at a Windows NT subsystem.) That has no equivalent this time around at all; unless one mis-casts UbuntuBSD (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326457</a>) in that rôle. It doesn&#x27;t really fit, though. &quot;Look, all you people with Ubuntu Linux application softwares. Forget that minority Windows thing that you ported to a couple of years ago. Come bring your applications to this new FreeBSD instead.&quot; (-:

Some long term thoughts:1) Linux has won the server (web) market. Developers would like to use a Unix box to work on their server code so they typically move to OS X. This could prevent that switch because they can still use Windows to developer their Linux server software.2) Many projects start out as Linux and stay Linux and are only ported after much time and effort to Windows. Enterprises when faced with a tool that they want to use will also look to switch off Windows. Now rather than the cost of switching they only have to pay to upgrade their windows boxes to use the tool.3) There is now a major incentive for developers to only build Linux binaries because it will work more places. This might cause a faster drain of developers as they eventually remove all windows specific code and can more easily migrate elsewhere. This feels eerily similar to the OS2 story and no doubt in the next week I expect to see more than a few articles discussing this very thing.4) It will be much easier for Microsoft to bring much loved Linux tools to Windows so you can expect to see a more rapid increase of tools announced that now work for Windows.

&quot;Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of &quot;wine&quot; -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their &quot;Windows Subsystem for Linux&quot;.&quot;I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on your own.

If you write a command line utility, just putting in ubuntu repo makes it available to all windows user, without even recompiling.

&gt; &quot;Hum, well it&#x27;s like cygwin perhaps?&quot; Nope! Cygwin includes open source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows. Here, we&#x27;re talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF binaries running directly in Windows.

My point is that you need a terminal program (like putty or iTerm2 on OS X for example) to get all the benefits.

Well I, for one, think he has a point. Part of what makes the shell so useful on Linux is, say, highlight-to-select. When the CMD.EXE doesn&#x27;t understand line breaks in copied text, it&#x27;s substantially crippled. You need a proper terminal to take advantage of a proper shell. They go hand-in-hand.

It doesn&#x27;t sound much different than a built in VM with a some optimizations. Just more bloat for windows I suppose.

You seem to completely miss the point of what they did. It is not a simple Bash recompilation for Windows. It is a way to run Linux (Ubuntu) binaries on Windows.

&quot;cmd.exe console&quot; means (presumably...) a standard Windows console subsystem window. This is independent of cmd.exe, but it&#x27;s common to conflate the two. Unix users often get this mixed up, presumably because they don&#x27;t believe Windows has any kind of layering or modularity ;)

It&#x27;s not about bash on windows, it&#x27;s about any Linux command line tool on windows (in bash).

If you just need bash on windows installing Git is the easiest way.

&gt; Unless there are some real changes to cmd.exe then it&#x27;s not that impressive.There actually have been [1], and I imagine MS has continued to flesh out those improvements.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11046433" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11046433</a>

&gt; Windows 10 users&gt; Can open the Windows Start menu&gt; And type &quot;bash&quot; [enter]&gt; Which opens a cmd.exe consoleRight... Bash is a shell, but your interaction with it is controlled by a terminal program. Unless there are some real changes to cmd.exe t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶&#x27;̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶i̶v̶e̶ . You can compile a native bash and other utils now yourself, it&#x27;s not that hard.EDIT: It&#x27;s more like a Linuxulator from BSD, which is certainly cool.

Would depend entirely on how you installed node, I would imagine.

Whatever it prints on Ubuntu I expect. Obviously it&#x27;s not going to return &quot;Windows&quot;, or &quot;UbuntuInWindows&quot; else anything that makes that call that would break.

As WinLS is very much like branded Solaris Zones, here&#x27;s what it looks like when you run `uname -a` in an (old, copypasta from the web) Linux branded zone:<pre><code> Linux centos 2.4.21 BrandZ fake linux i686 i686 i386 GNU&#x2F;Linux</code></pre>

So if I install Node as a Linux binary. Can I access it in Windows &quot;environment&quot; too?Does that mean I can do &quot;apt-get install nginx&quot; from their new &quot;bash&quot; terminal app? Does that then run under port 80 in Windows? Since no VM is involved.I&#x27;m still a bit confused.

Depends if the node is a Windows executable or a Linux binary.

Seems less honest than the Linux env on FreeBSD, which at least puts FreeBSD in there for uname -a. Eg:% uname -srm
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE amd64
% &#x2F;compat&#x2F;linux&#x2F;bin&#x2F;bash
bash-4.1$ &#x2F;bin&#x2F;uname -srm 
Linux 2.6.32 i686
bash-4.1$ &#x2F;bin&#x2F;uname -a 
Linux viserion 2.6.32 FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE #0 4b75b72(releng&#x2F;10.3): Fri Mar 25 19:14:5 i686 i686 i386 GNU&#x2F;Linux
bash-4.1$ cat &#x2F;proc&#x2F;cpuinfo | grep &#x27;model name&#x27; | head -1
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz

See this screenshot showing uname -a: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-PTJrez4z0Jc&#x2F;Vvr-VH5DQOI&#x2F;AAAAAAAFHcg&#x2F;8F_2fBEG3kg-Y0aV2mURdJqk66gsoEWeg&#x2F;s1600&#x2F;bash.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-PTJrez4z0Jc&#x2F;Vvr-VH5DQOI&#x2F;AAAAAAAFH...</a>

If you want a Linux container on Windows (which they do not seem to propose right away, but it seems a logical step), you need a Linux ABI.

I just see this as a headache for developers.I don&#x27;t want or need a Linux ABI, I just want to run a Linux container on Windows (if I have to use windows, which I would prefer not to do).If node running on windows needs access to a database running on the Linux layer then what happens when things aren&#x27;t working? They can&#x27;t possibly make all programs interact in a seamless way.I&#x27;m imagining frankenstein programs that are hacked together with code that only works on this frankenstein OS.

Looks like, if a posix system is detected at compile time, it will return whatever it gets from the `uname` system call in `sys&#x2F;utsname.h`:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodejs&#x2F;node&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;node_os.cc#L59" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodejs&#x2F;node&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;node_os.cc#L5...</a>Microsoft probably hard-codes a response of &quot;Linux&quot; (or whatever would be normal for Ubuntu) for that call to prevent Ubuntu binaries from freaking out.

So what OS you&#x27;re going to get when you run an application under this? So if I run this:<pre><code> node -e &#x27;console.log(require(&quot;os&quot;).type())&#x27;
</code></pre>
What it&#x27;s going to print?

It will be on every Windows 10 machine, but not Windows 8.1 on the Surface RT, obviously.

Now I just hope this will also be enabled in the Windows 10 build running on the Surface.

Or unlinking an open file. Something you can&#x27;t do on traditional Windows kernels IIRC.

Yeah, that&#x27;s something that really interests me.  Likewise I want to know how extended attributes and streams are mapped.

reminds me of &#x27;90 teleshopping videos..

in the demo video <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;channel9.msdn.com&#x2F;Events&#x2F;Build&#x2F;2016&#x2F;P488" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;channel9.msdn.com&#x2F;Events&#x2F;Build&#x2F;2016&#x2F;P488</a> it&#x27;s visible at 05:53 that the files all belong to root:root and have mode 777

It looks like alternize was almost right, at 4:39 you can see that within the Ubuntu (not &#x2F;mnt) part, default permissions are used. e.g.: `ls -l proc` reveals that much of it is read only.If the Ubuntu on Windows personality&#x2F;subsystem gave Linux processes full permissions to &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c, I&#x27;d expect that would be a security vulnerability, and I&#x27;d assume they are doing some mapping. Unfortunately, in the video they posted I never see them do `ls -l` on `&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c`, only a subdirectory they created.

Correction: filesystem permissions are not fully emulated, but they aren&#x27;t disobeyed either. Looks like everything obeys the user&#x27;s permissions, which is good, but everything under &#x2F;mnt shows up as 777 root&#x2F;root.

Are posix permissions supported&#x2F;emulated? Or are they set to 777 for all Windows drives in &#x2F;mnt like shared folders in a VM?

I use them.  They&#x27;re also heavily used by the OS itself -- the entire WinSxS folder structure is a whole lot of symlinks.

I used to use them (directory junction points) quite a bit back when 64GB SSDs were still expensive and I wanted to redirect a few folders without changing my folder structure.Nowadays, the most common use I&#x27;ve seen is as the Windows implementation of &#x27;npm link&#x27; for Node.js developers.

I was being a little over dramatic windows has like 1B installs obviously someone &quot;uses&quot; them.

Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command.  That said no one uses them.

I wonder how buggy thus is. For example, how do symlinks work given windows doesn&#x27;t have an equivalent that behaves the same.

That was only for 32 bit containers. FreeBSD 11 should have 64-bit linux support though.

I think FreeBSD linuxulator has 64bit support too since they introduced Docker support last year.

Oh, that&#x27;s a shame.  When was it removed?

You can&#x27;t use lx-branded zones in Solaris anymore, but SmartOS has revived and continued the project, and OmniOS has started porting the bits into their distribution, too.

I think this was a smart balance between getting it out there and seeing if it will stick.  Someone said POSIX went by the wayside some time back so they may be a little hesitant in jumping all in.  If this gets adoption, they can improve upon it in a future release.

&quot;FreeBSD has had 32-bit ABI compatibility for at least a decade&quot;Longer. I was using linux binary compat, in FreeBSD, to run the linux version of vmware workstation back in 2001.It has always been very well done, and as you can see, not just running &#x27;cat&#x27; or &#x27;echo&#x27; linux binaries ... but full blown commercial software packages.I had Windows XP running, as a dev environment, within the Linux version of vmware workstation, on my freebsd laptop. Worked great.There was an oft-repeated claim in those days (the days of FreeBSD 4.x) that linux binary compat in FreeBSD would run linux binaries faster than linux would.

To clarify, it sounds like what Microsoft has added to Windows 10 is a Linux ABI.This has been done before with other x86 OSes: FreeBSD has had 32-bit ABI compatibility for at least a decade (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;linuxemu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;linuxemu.html</a>), and the &quot;lx branded zone&quot; for Solaris has it as well (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;cd&#x2F;E19455-01&#x2F;817-1592&#x2F;gchhy&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;cd&#x2F;E19455-01&#x2F;817-1592&#x2F;gchhy&#x2F;index.ht...</a>).

I frigging love i3, but not a big fan of thinkpad and linux desktop combo.I ordered a surface pro 4 and planning to run i3 in a VM with my existing nixOS configuration. I wonder how this news will affect my workflow.I have emacs running as a systemd service and client emacs connecting to it, so it&#x27;s quite a killer combo for development.

1) You have native EMacs for W32 since forever
2) Run XMing in fullscreen mode
3) Compaile and run i3.

What? This is sick!? I can&#x27;t wait for this to happen! Maybe I am gonna get one of those Surface Books after all... though I am gonna miss my i3 setup... I wonder if X (or wayland! or wayland...) can run as well... Native Emacs FTW :)

And OS X, and BSD, and OS2 and AmigaOS and probably one million other OSses.

They are programs which are included in the Ubuntu distribution.

Ubuntu ate Linux (or GNU&#x2F;Linux), as it seems, for the mainstream world.I hate it. I bet Stallman, Ken Thomson, the GNU Project, Bell Labs and many others are crying and laughing at the same time.We live in a world built upon the previous one, as the previous was already was. Some things we forget, others become lore, folklore, myths, and others are lost...
It is similar to Facebook providing Internet. Or Dropbox providing &#x27;rsync&#x27;. Maybe one day the common man will rediscover plaintext and the command line interface. And the then hipsters will use it.Some links:- find <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.cat-v.org&#x2F;unix&#x2F;find-history" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.cat-v.org&#x2F;unix&#x2F;find-history</a>- grep <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@rualthanzauva&#x2F;grep-was-a-private-command-of-mine-for-quite-a-while-before-i-made-it-public-ken-thompson-a40e24a5ef48" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@rualthanzauva&#x2F;grep-was-a-private-command...</a>- cp <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8305283" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8305283</a>- wget <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wget#cite_note-13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wget#cite_note-13</a>- AWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s, and its name is derived from the family names of its authors – Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. ~ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AWK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AWK</a>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cryptonomicon.com&#x2F;beginning.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cryptonomicon.com&#x2F;beginning.html</a>BONUS:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.ubuntu.com&#x2F;DashAsBinSh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.ubuntu.com&#x2F;DashAsBinSh</a>

I&#x27;m confused what has this list:apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...to do with Ubuntu?

Thanks. This link has a lot more (real) information.

&quot;C-x C-c... what does that even mean?&quot;

&quot;Of course, I have no idea how to CLOSE emacs, so I&#x27;ll close the window. ;)&quot;What if you read the welcome screen, Mr. Scott ;) ?

The link you posted is the original article at the top of this HN thread.

Looks like they are launching ELF files, then translating the linux syscalls to WIN32API calls at runtime.

Scott Hanselman has a good write-up here:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...</a>Google Cache: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;...</a>

I was excited until I reached the Windows Store part.

No, you don&#x27;t need overcommit for COW fork. You can fully commit the writable pages of the new process. Yes, that uses a bit of pagefile space, but disk space is cheap, and this approach works fine. You can (and should, if you care about robustness) turn off overcommit on Linux too.

Looks like it wouldn&#x27;t be the first copy-on-write fork() on NT; Interix had that already many years ago.Solaris doesn&#x27;t have VM over-commit either, and few people would claim it&#x27;s not a fully featured UNIX.

I wonder if they implemented a copy-on-write fork syscall in NT. Otherwise it will be slower (and use a lot more memory) in some scenarios.Edit: And cow fork only makes sense if there is memory over-commit. So to be fully featured it would need a separate memory subsystem with memory over-commit.

I&#x27;ve been &quot;stuck&quot; with a 2010 Macbook since Apple isn&#x27;t refreshing it&#x27;s laptop hardware soon enough. Plus I&#x27;m sick of soldered in RAM and other BS.For devs that do heavy Linux work (but have stuck with a Mac OS for GUI&#x2F;app reasons), is it time to move (back) to Windows? If so, what would be a good laptop to get at the moment?

Wait, getting node to work on windows is a pita?I know of no language runtime and ecosystem that has better cross-platform support than Node (hm ok maybe Java also). I develop solely on Windows (I just like it better) and virtually all of NPM just works on my box. Even stuff people never tested elsewhere than on their Macs, it just works. Express, webpack, mocha, phantomjs, it&#x27;s really quite impressive if you ask me.

I completely agree. I only really switched to OSX because getting node tools to work on windows and cygwin is a pita.

&gt; I&#x27;m constantly thinking of moving to OSX as my primary OS is the amount of command-line tooling that is available in the system. Everything new is always there first.Having had OS X, Windows, and various Linux distributions as my primary operating systems I would consider having an Arch Linux VM kicking around if you want all the packages in the world, maintained fairly well.

Me too - but why not a Linux VM or a VPS? Its mostly for textual usage, no?(My own answer is that cheap VPSes are 150ms away from me, and with Virtualbox I had a few problems, always related to Windows file permissions yada yada yada...)

I agree. I&#x27;m (mostly) a Windows user, and the one reason I&#x27;m constantly thinking of moving to OSX as my primary OS is the amount of command-line tooling that is available in the system. Everything new is always there first. I&#x27;ve started feeling that I was holding back by staying on Windows, even if using Mingw daily.This might be the thing that saves Windows as a dev machine for me. I&#x27;m a heavy cmd&#x2F;powershell user but I&#x27;d migrate to bash in an instant.

this, so many people that develop OSS do so on mac laptops because it&#x27;s so easy to get the toolchain working, with real linux binaries in windows it&#x27;s making the value proposition of the surface book a lot stronger for developers.

I would argue that gnu coreutils is this base. Available on al *Nix OS, including Mac.

We have exactly what you&#x27;re talking about. It&#x27;s called POSIX.&quot;The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems.&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;POSIX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;POSIX</a>)

Its actually kind of interesting that we dont have a literal &quot;standard base&quot; of tools that any OS should supply.(unless I am missing something)But it would make sense that certain things should be doable on literally any computer. grep, find, vi, edit, etc... etc... I cant come up with a complete list - but it would be great to start that direction.

I believe there will be many hoops to jump through to use this as a development environment too, and the limitations of this ABI will be plenty.

microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to get Mac users. I think it&#x27;s a real smart move.Apple leveraged a form of BSD -nix to get developer mindshare. Now Microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to leapfrog Apple. It is a smart move. While OS X isn&#x27;t bad for -nix-like development, it still involves jumping through hoops and compromises. (Homebrew&#x2F;Macports)

Of course Mac Users think it&#x27;s about them - everything is about them.

microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to get Mac users. I think it&#x27;s a real smart move.The author points to using grep and Xargs and some other tools to quickly update a package. That&#x27;s the key here. These bash&#x2F;Linux utilities are productivy boosters for all the Linux and Mac&#x2F;bsd people out there. I can&#x27;t imagine living without them and they&#x27;re necessary for any system I develop on (which is currently a Mac).

I&#x27;ve read comments where people wrote that NT always had some kind of POSIX subsystem, and it has probably just now been completed and expanded.Can&#x27;t find any substantial writings on this, but it seems likely.

They actually do syscall translation on the fly from Linux to Windows. I suppose they had to add some calls to Windows for things in Linux that did not exist on Windows (various console ioctls for e.g.) but it is still a one to one translation.

From the screenshots, it seems there is a full kernel in there - e.g. you have &#x2F;proc&#x2F;cpuinfo, and it identifies as Linux 3.4.0.If they just implemented all Linux syscalls on top of NT, that would replace a Linux kernel. There would be no Linux kernel running on top. But in that case they would also need to emulate stuff like &#x2F;proc. (This is the &quot;reverse Wine&quot; scenario.)So I personally think it is either:
- There is no new subsystem, this is just a linux.exe running the Linux kernel as a process, like CoLinux does
or
- There is a new subsystem. One way to do this is to port Linux to a new &quot;architecture&quot;, namely the NT HAL. You&#x27;d call into the NT native API from the linux kernel, which would mean you&#x27;d have to put the headers with the native APIs you use under the GPL.Armchair kernel development is fun :-)

I expect they implemented a subsystem for Linux at the syscall level - i.e. they implemented the Linux kernel&#x27;s interface at the ABI level. No headers would need to intermingle with open source; compile on Linux, run on Windows.

Just a remark. npm&#x27;s team fixed long paths in v3.0, so now you have &quot;flat tree&quot;.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;67293&#x2F;3965517" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;67293&#x2F;3965517</a> indicates that NT does support fork properly, just not exposed to usermode normally.

So, max path length in Linux user space will be about 215 chars? (for it to be accessible from Windows user space)MAX_PATH in Windows = 260Path to Linux file system root from Windows user space:&quot;C:\Users\&lt;user&gt;\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\&quot; - about 45 charsMax depth reachable from Windows user space = 260 - 45 = 215

&gt; It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by &quot;mounting&quot; windows drives in &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c (or &#x2F;cygdrive&#x2F;c).I wonder if this Unix filesystem layer will be able to break the Windows legacy path length limit. If so, the Linux version of Node.js will suddenly become much more useful than the Windows version.&gt; It remains to be seen if this is better (more performant) or worseSounds like performance, at least, will be better. TFA says &quot;it&#x27;s totally shit hot! The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance.&quot; I&#x27;ll reserve judgment until I see the fork() benchmarks. :)

I imagine that 3) and 5) are hedged by how well Visual Studio is doing.

Your first point describes me exactly (and many other developers I know). I grew up a Windows user, and switched to OS X because of the unix-like command line environment that more closely matched the servers I was working with in my job environments.I would most likely switch back to Windows as my primary&#x2F;only machine (because I also like to play video games sometimes) if I had the same kind of unix-like command line environment that I get in OS X.Right now I basically need 2 computers at home to meet all my needs, but this would allow me to reduce it to one, so I could get a much better one (instead of the 2 mid-range ones I have now).

On a practical level, this doesn&#x27;t change anything for games. Anyone writing games for Linux is already using cross-platform tech like SDL or OpenGL or Allegro, or one of the many increasingly popular high-level engines.Well, I guess it&#x27;ll be easier to port roguelikes which use ncurses.

I wouldn&#x27;t expect (commercial) games to use this, even indies. Gamers (on Windows) are extremely harsh if you ship a buggy product, and this tends to be what happens for most linux ports. Gamers on linux are more forgiving since it&#x27;s very hard to guarantee quality on linux, so they&#x27;re more used to it. I&#x27;d be surprised if anybody wants to give that up on windows.

Some long term thoughts:1) Linux has won the server (web) market. Developers would like to use a Unix box to work on their server code so they typically move to OS X. This could prevent that switch because they can still use Windows to developer their Linux server software.2) Many projects start out as Linux and stay Linux and are only ported after much time and effort to Windows. Enterprises when faced with a tool that they want to use will also look to switch off Windows. Now rather than the cost of switching they only have to pay to upgrade their windows boxes to use the tool.3) There is now a major incentive for developers to only build Linux binaries because it will work more places. This might cause a faster drain of developers as they eventually remove all windows specific code and can more easily migrate elsewhere. This feels eerily similar to the OS2 story and no doubt in the next week I expect to see more than a few articles discussing this very thing.4) It will be much easier for Microsoft to bring much loved Linux tools to Windows so you can expect to see a more rapid increase of tools announced that now work for Windows.5) Games: What about the graphical layer? Can I write the majority of my game as a Linux binary and only have the rendering bit left over to separately implement for Linux&#x2F;Windows? Will this spur an increase of cross platform games?

&gt; - If you just wanted bash and some posix tools, the harder but nicer way would be to patch them to understand windows paths. It is not clear to me that it is even possible, for example many tools assume a path that does not start with a slash is a relative path - while &quot;C:\&quot; is absolute. You would also want to make more windows apps understand forward slashes like &quot;C:&#x2F;Windows&quot;. To make things even more complicated, there are NT native paths &quot;\Device\HarddiskVolume4\Users\Bill&quot;, UNC paths &quot;\\Server\share&quot;, and the crazy syntax &quot;\\?\C:\MyReallyLongPath\File.txt&quot;.One of the good things about using &quot;newer&quot; languages than C for building cross-platform utilities[0] is that things like that come baked in[1].[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EricLagergren&#x2F;go-coreutils" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EricLagergren&#x2F;go-coreutils</a>
[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;path&#x2F;filepath&#x2F;#IsAbs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;path&#x2F;filepath&#x2F;#IsAbs</a>

And you can also use forward slashes. I&#x27;ve used them in applications (Java apps, NodeJS apps, etc) and in the command line since at least Windows 7.

&gt; Windows uses drive letters and backslashes, unix has a root filesystem with forward slashes.Windows also has mountpoints. When I use a Windows system, I pretend that C: is the only drive, and mount external volumes under the root, Unix-style. I then install Cygwin in the C:\ root, creating the illusion of a fairly Unix-ish filesystem layout.

Regarding the AppX thing... Actually AppX packaged apps (even from the Store in AppContainer) have always had direct filesystem access, but only from their install directory and to&#x2F;from their AppData directories. It&#x27;s only access outside those areas which requires use of the picker and&#x2F;or library capabilities (which both go through a broker process).They can also of course load DLLs, and there are APIs for moving your app Windows around (with some limitations).That said, I do not know exactly what they&#x27;re doing here, and it may be using some new capabilities being added to the system in the rs1 release.

PIDs from Windows are not exposed when looking at &#x2F;proc, so I am guessing you will not be able to `kill -9 explorer.exe` unless there is some real voodoo going on (and then it would not be POSIX compatible, anyways).I think the command that you meant to say was killall :) `kill` will only kill pids, not process names.

&quot;The hardest part of running bash and other posix things under windows is filesystem access. Windows uses drive letters and backslashes, unix has a root filesystem with forward slashes. It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by &quot;mounting&quot; windows drives in &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c (or &#x2F;cygdrive&#x2F;c).&quot;How do these ubuntu tools interact with the rest of the windows system that they are running on ?Can I &#x27;kill -9 explorer.exe&#x27; ?Can I touch a file in &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c&#x2F;(whatever)&#x2F;Desktop ... and have that file actually show up on my windows desktop ?

A few random thoughts:- Wow, hell is really freezing over!- The hardest part of running bash and other posix things under windows is filesystem access. Windows uses drive letters and backslashes, unix has a root filesystem with forward slashes. It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by &quot;mounting&quot; windows drives in &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c (or &#x2F;cygdrive&#x2F;c).- If you just wanted bash and some posix tools, the harder but nicer way would be to patch them to understand windows paths. It is not clear to me that it is even possible, for example many tools assume a path that does not start with a slash is a relative path - while &quot;C:\&quot; is absolute. You would also want to make more windows apps understand forward slashes like &quot;C:&#x2F;Windows&quot;. To make things even more complicated, there are NT native paths &quot;\Device\HarddiskVolume4\Users\Bill&quot;, UNC paths &quot;\\Server\share&quot;, and the crazy syntax &quot;\\?\C:\MyReallyLongPath\File.txt&quot;.- I am really surprised this works in an appx container. From my little dabbling with modern apps in Visual Studio, I&#x27;ve found that they are incredibly sandboxed - no filesystem access unless you go through a file picker, no network connections to localhost (!?), no control of top-level windows, no loading of external DLLs. You can get around most restrictions for sideloaded apps, but not for windows store apps. That they can now package such a complex application as a modern app (with maybe only the linux subsystem DLLs delivered externally) means that they are slowly moving the modern&#x2F;universal apps and traditional Win32 apps together with regards to their powers.- Running a Linux kernel in windows, and then ELF executables on top (without virtualization) is nothing new, see CoLinux or andLinux. If I understand correctly, this new work uses a new Linux NT subsystem. It remains to be seen if this is better (more performant) or worse (if the Linux kernel is just another process, and it crashes, it doesn&#x27;t take down the system).- If they actually wrote a NT subsystem for Linux, this opens a whole can of GPL licensing worms, as you&#x27;ll need to include internal NT headers. However, they say it is closed source, so I wonder how they did it.- This really stands and falls with how well it is integrated in the rest of the system. I want to install tools in &quot;Ubuntu&quot; via apt and use them from cmd.exe, and vice versa. And long term, a X11&#x2F;Wayland bridge would be nice too.

As a dev, I don&#x27;t use the screwed up bash on any system I work on. It just doesn&#x27;t work.

&gt; -For Canonical, it reinforces the idea that Ubuntu == Linux, which is really good for their bottom lineAnd Microsoft manages to undermine RedHat at the same time. Win-Win for them, why the Linux community should be excited about it, I don&#x27;t know.

-It solidifies Bash as the dev. shell of choice-It facilitates app cross comparability-For Canonical, it reinforces the idea that Ubuntu == Linux, which is really good for their bottom line-I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Microsoft forked over a solid amount of cash

It helps push Windows developers to use Ubuntu on Azure.

From the Scott Hanselman link posted elsewhere in this comment thread:&gt; Note that this isn&#x27;t about Linux Servers or Server workloads. 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.It helps Canonical deploy Linux on the server in places that refuse to run Linux on the desktop, since Microsoft has said they&#x27;re not interested in replacing Linux on the server with lxss on the server. This is absolutely good for certain subsets of the &quot;Linux community&quot; with certain motivations and ideologies. (And awful for others, of course.)

I think Canonical thought helping Microsoft was good for Canonical, and I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a bad thing.

How is it a bad idea? It&#x27;s a step to making Linux a more viable platform for software to target and makes life easier for a subset of application developers who already target Linux. I&#x27;m sure there will be a few people who would otherwise switch to Linux entirely and may not now, but I would expect this to do more good than harm to Linux.

Basically, Ubuntu steam rolls the other distributions in terms of reach. My guess, looking at previous Visual C++ posts about a gdb extension [0], and them asking about CMake projects [1], is that Visual C++ will support seamless building, and debugging of Linux programs. This then makes it super easy for developers to develop an Ubuntu binary.Having a large number of people developing on Ubuntu, may increase the demand for Ubuntu Server (with support where the real money is). I really only see an upside for Canonical.0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;vcblog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;announcing-the-vs-gdb-debugger-extension&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;vcblog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;announcin...</a>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;vcblog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;29&#x2F;developing-c-cross-platform-projects-with-cmake&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;vcblog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;29&#x2F;developin...</a>

I hear you  
they think its a good thing everyone i know says now no need to stay on linux i&#x27;m switching to windows 10  at least my colleages are doing so now

How in God&#x27;s green earth did Canonical think helping Microsoft with this was a good idea for the Linux community?

Well we are close. But I thought the 1st of April idea was to make the joke on 1st and reveal it after that date. Not to make a joke in March and tell people it was a joke on 1st of April...

April fools.Coming next: Windows 11 will use Linux kernel.

A performant fork - the single biggest problem with Cygwin - sounds awesome. As does the ability to run Linux binaries directly, opening up the direct use of binary package repos.I wonder if I can use it via mintty instead of conhost.exe; at the very least, I could ssh into it from Cygwin.As always, the devil is in the details; the rough edges where support peters out, or syscall inconsistencies creep in.

The important question of course is: when it will appear in Windows Server?Incidentally, I&#x27;ve found the Windows 2012R2 to be my favorite OS for the desktop from the Windows family.

Wondering if ansible will work...
If done right - I fell desktop linux and OSX market share will shrink

I&#x27;m guessing you are right. The usual problems with &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c. I was wondering about rootfs being per user as well. On a server that may be a problem, but perhaps not on a laptop. It sounds like this is not meant to be the basis for production level deployments, but useful for development.

I&#x27;m reading between the lines, but it looks like the linux subsystem is using a separate file system.    So you&#x27;ll have the usual problems when using files from &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c, but other files are mounted in a unixy file system of some sort.   The Ubuntu file system is mounted onto your Windows subsystem at C:\Users\&lt;user&gt;\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\, according to the article.

How do they handle various NTFS related issues? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cygwin.com&#x2F;cygwin-ug-net&#x2F;using-specialnames.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cygwin.com&#x2F;cygwin-ug-net&#x2F;using-specialnames.html</a>

By default, but you can tell Cygwin to use &#x2F;c&#x2F; though. Really handy when you switch between the two, and actually makes more sense (what else would be &#x2F;c&#x2F; ?)

MSYS2 mounts C:\ under &#x2F;c&#x2F; and Cygwin under &#x2F;cygdrive&#x2F;c&#x2F; so what&#x27;s the real deal?

&gt; All of your Windows drives, like C: are mounted read&#x2F;write directly under &#x2F;mnt.Its the real deal lads, congratulation Microsoft.

All the CLI packages I want that are on Ubuntu are also on Windows. I don&#x27;t see Windows users dying for lack of applications...

It&#x27;s not a &#x27;few&#x27; core utilities. It&#x27;s any packages available on Ubuntu.

So I can install apt then install apps like Firefox, Thunderbird and run them that way instead of using Windows binaries? Interesting ...

You can run any* Linux binary on WinLS, including apt-get in the Ubuntu rootfs.* within the probably surprisingly broad limits of the WinLS syscall emulation, though it wouldn&#x27;t support niche OS config stuff, SELinux calls, etc.

... what changes in later kernels?Remember the holy edict of Linux kernel development: you don&#x27;t break userspace.

I&#x27;m with you.  Interesting novelty, but I would absolutely not bank on doing anything missions critical with this.  Wait 5 years for the excitement to die down and lets see if the team stuck maintaining this is even going to be around anymore.  Are they committing to keeping the syscall translation layer up to date with changes in later kernels, etc?  Or is this going to turn into another &#x27;You can run Android apps on Windows!&#x27; announcement that fizzles out after they realize how much work they&#x27;ve gotten into...

I can use those few core utilities to build and run other more useful utilities.

I don&#x27;t get it. What&#x27;s the use case for a few core utilities running natively?

Sweet baby Jesus. If this can alleviate at least half of the issues running cygwin&#x2F;babun&#x2F;msys&#x2F;whatnots... Namely, 64-bitness, speed, and repository madness.

I get the impression that it&#x27;s a new filesystem, so C:\Users\Kirkland\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs is a file containing a linuxy file system that&#x27;s mounted onto &#x2F; in the Linux subsystem and onto C:\Users\Kirkland\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\ on the Windows subsystem.

Yes, as mentioned in the article, &#x2F; on the Linux side maps to C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\, and C:\ on the Windows side maps to &#x2F;mnt&#x2F;c&#x2F; on the Linux side.Think of it as an Ubuntu chroot on Windows, with C:\ bind-mounted into the chroot.

What is up with the unix-y directory structure in this screenshot?<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;o.aolcdn.com&#x2F;dims-global&#x2F;dims3&#x2F;GLOB&#x2F;resize&#x2F;1345x666&#x2F;quality&#x2F;80&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;o92a2876.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;o.aolcdn.com&#x2F;dims-global&#x2F;dims3&#x2F;GLOB&#x2F;resize&#x2F;1345x666&#x2F;q...</a>It&#x27;s been a while since I&#x27;ve used Windows but I&#x27;m pretty sure it doesn&#x27;t have a unix directory structure... is it the case that they map &#x2F; to a folder inside windows?

This seems like it could be pretty amazing for developing and testing some of our backend computer vision tools directly in Windows.What would be really amazing would be if you could use CUDA and cuDNN from Ubuntu executables in Windows 10.

Sounds like they might open it. But probably it won&#x27;t be as useful as Wine which is portable to POSIX systems. May be it can benefit ReactOS or something.What could be good though is MS backing the Wine project. But I guess it goes too much against their lock-in DNA.

&quot;Microsoft calls it their &quot;Windows Subsystem for Linux&quot;.  (No, it&#x27;s not open source at this time.)&quot;

This is a &quot;Windows Subsystem&quot; implementation. There are no open subsystem implementations and it hasn&#x27;t been documented. Therefore it&#x27;s a little far-fetched that they would release this as open source. Not impossible though.

And here you&#x27;ve hit upon what would actually be interesting: the open sourcing of Windows itself, open sourcing of Hyper-V, etc. This is a &#x27;nice to have&#x27; addition to Windows for sure. But it really does nothing to make Windows more relevant as an open source platform which is actually a major technical strength of most UNIX-alikes. And no I&#x27;m not saying Microsoft has to go GPL.

So it&#x27;s like Wine in reverse. Is it FOSS?

The article also reminded me of this. I didn&#x27;t use it much because Cygwin was a little less painful.

The significant difference here is that it&#x27;s running unmodified Linux binaries. Compile on Linux, run in windows.You should be able to compile functioning Linux binaries on Windows and run them on Linux as well.

15+ years ago Microsoft shipped a UNIX subsystem for Windows NT&#x2F;2k.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX</a>It blew my mind at the time, but it was kind of a pain and I didn&#x27;t stick with it. I don&#x27;t remember why.I guess this is about same thing, only its Linux instead of some other sort of UNIX.

AFAIK, Windows 10 registration amounts to generating a hash based on your hardware and storing it online. If you reinstall Windows 10 now and try to register again (and have not updated the hardware, e.g. replaced the hard drive), the same hash will be generated again and your machine will be recognized as already registered. So there should be no extra license cost involved.

Not necessary; just download the iso.
Well, the iso maker on another Windows machine.

I&#x27;m fairly certain you can just reinstall Windows 10 and not have to deal with any licensing shenanigans.  I&#x27;m no expert but I think it&#x27;s baked into the machine itself these days.

I am a little annoyed at myself. One of my 5 laptops is a HPStream 11 that was running Windows 10 until a few months ago when I wiped the disk and installed Ubuntu. Windows 10 is not bad at all, and I would have enjoyed keeping a Windows 10 machine handy with the new Ubuntu user land support.

Microsoft also had or still has something called SFU - Services For Unix. I know they were working on it some years ago. But that could be for some sort of interoperability, not the same as this thing.

Glad to see everyone taking the title so literally, &quot;_Bash_ on Windows.&quot;

As a Windows and BSD user, I completely switched to the superior ksh.

Now windows users can learn bash cmd line and switch completely!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;wine&#x2F;files&#x2F;Win32%20Packages&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;wine&#x2F;files&#x2F;Win32%20Packages...</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldwiki.winehq.org&#x2F;WineOnWindows" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldwiki.winehq.org&#x2F;WineOnWindows</a>

For some older games and applications, they run on Wine better than newer Windows, so that might actually be a useful.

Whew, I&#x27;ll finally be able to run WINE on windows! :)

I wonder how long it&#x27;ll be until we see some kind of NT kernel with GNU userland distribution (GNU&#x2F;NT?).

Oh yes... That&#x27;s one of the reasons I switched to OSX.

They&#x27;re working on it.  The rub now is that they can&#x27;t handle (last I checked) using two monitors with significantly different DPIs.  At least, that&#x27;s how it was with my retina macbook and using an external monitor that was low DPI.

You can now START or STOP bash on Windows.

Confused: can we now START or STOP bashing windows?

Title of the article made me think, bash on Windows? Why is that news?

I know it&#x27;s just an example, but both of the games you mentioned have had Mac versions for a very long time, if not initial release.

I remember similar thoughts when the first MacBook (x86) came out in early 2006, as I was just starting university, and also thinking &quot;Hmm, this is all probably going to be huge, and I should find out how to buy Apple stock with this ~$1200 I have... oh, no, I&#x27;ll buy a MacBook for myself.&quot;Ten years later, I&#x27;m totally bored with Apple and OS X. Especially after trying to use Xcode and the iOS Development Cloud Platform or whatever. So yeah, I&#x27;d probably switch to Microsoft Linux.And I could totally play Counter-Strike and Diablo II while pausing from coding bash scripts? Omg!

I remember seeing an ad for an PowerBook (oh, this first one one: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xaharts.org&#x2F;funny&#x2F;Apple_Mac_OS_X_Unix_ad.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xaharts.org&#x2F;funny&#x2F;Apple_Mac_OS_X_Unix_ad.html</a> ) back in 2002 (apparently) and thinking: &quot;Wow, now I want one.&quot; Outstanding pitch. And for the last decade and a half so have a huge number busy engineers, scientists and most recently and profoundly, web developers. Microsoft is making a very smart move here, even if it is exceedingly late.

I was watching the stream and I think they said Windows console host will, in fact, directly support VT-100.

&gt;as well as UTF-8.UTF-8 was always available as codepage 65001.

&gt; I hope they wouldn&#x27;t assume everyone&#x27;s tmux setup uses only characters from codepage 437.I hope that people here aren&#x27;t assuming that terminals are all VT100 clones. (-:The old (Interix) Windows NT POSIX subsystem added escape sequence recognition to Windows consoles when POSIX programs were using them as their terminal output. Such terminals match up with an &quot;Interix&quot; terminal type in the termcap and terminfo databases. Their escape sequence set is not the same as any DEC VT type.The Dickey ncurses termcap database has an &quot;interix|opennt|ntconsole&quot; entry, although I have encountered systems with ncurses but without this termcap entry and had to add it myself. It is, apparently, wrong. David Given has a different one in LBW.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;library&#x2F;bb463194.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;library&#x2F;bb463194.aspx</a>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisible-island.net&#x2F;ncurses&#x2F;colored-terminfo.src.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisible-island.net&#x2F;ncurses&#x2F;colored-terminfo.src.htm...</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Developer_guide&#x2F;Build_Instructions&#x2F;Building_on_Windows_with_SFU_%28Interix%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Developer_g...</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sedwards&#x2F;lbw&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;extras&#x2F;interix.termcap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sedwards&#x2F;lbw&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;extras&#x2F;interix.t...</a>

It sounds like this would involve tweaking conhost.exe so that it understands all the vt100 sequences, as well as UTF-8. (I hope they wouldn&#x27;t assume everyone&#x27;s tmux setup uses only characters from codepage 437.)If they did that, it would also fix the awfulness of Python&#x27;s stdout on Windows!

The reason why they don&#x27;t work was actually on-screen, very briefly until Russ Alexander cleared it (again), in the Microsoft demo video. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11415843" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11415843</a> .

&quot;But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty&#x27;s an the vt100. My beloved byobu, screen, and tmux don&#x27;t quite work yet, but they&#x27;re getting close!&quot;If they actually fix these imperfections, that would be fantastic. It would address a number issues that are &quot;unfixable&quot; in Cygwin flavors of utilities&#x2F;apps.

Better, it seems like this is literally running the same Linux binaries as would run on Ubuntu on Windows. Git bash uses msys so those binaries are recompiled for Windows. And he casually mentioned apt, which is pretty crazy if they can actually have the standard apt repositories working on Windows without modification.

Completely different.  Git bash is based on msys which is a suite of Linux&#x2F;Unix tools ported to compile and run natively on Windows.  This is taking actual Linux programs and running them as-is on Windows.  Wherever the Linux programs make system calls to the Linux kernel, etc. there is a shim layer from MS that translates those calls into Windows system calls.  It&#x27;s not going to be 100% perfect compatibility with every app, but will probably support a lot more stuff than msys.

Is this better, the same, or worse than git bash?

Flinux was the first thing in my mind when I saw this. Could this be inspired from it? In which case, at least some sort of recognition or attribution would have been great considering the amount of effort Flinux author has put into it.

Interesting! I&#x27;ve been following Flinux [1], but it&#x27;s not ready for day to day use. I hope this one will be soon![1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wishstudio&#x2F;flinux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wishstudio&#x2F;flinux&#x2F;</a>

Microsoft wasn&#x27;t trying very hard to make their Kerberos compatible with MIT Kerberos, at least in the mid &#x27;90s. I think you&#x27;d still be laughed at, especially since Windows was ubiquitous, Unix was niche, and Linux was a niche within a niche.

No, they&#x27;d point to Kerberos and ask what the difference is.

POSIX calls, which have always been there but require a recompiled binary, are different than the binary compatibility announced today. This additional step is actually quite an impressive feat of software engineering. To think that Microsoft would care so much about maintaining compatibility would have seemed ridiculous just a few years ago.

They&#x27;d laugh, because NT already had posix system calls <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;contents&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10224.posix-and-unix-support-in-windows.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;contents&#x2F;articles&#x2F;1...</a>

Imagine going back in time to the 90s and telling people that in 2016 Microsoft would bend over backwards to make sure Windows could run Linux ELF binaries natively in the kernel by converting syscalls. You&#x27;d probably be laughed at.