Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux is a band-aid solution for a fundamental problem for Microsoft: Linux tooling and kernel are IT industry standards.

People have been developing on OS X outside a VM for a while now, and OS X is most definitely not linux. If they can get WSL to be as linuxy as OS X (and arguably it's already close), Windows will be as good a dev platform for linux development as OS X.

But they really need to fix notepad so it supports unix style line endings. That part of the demo was a bit embarrassing.

WSL is more Linuxy than macOS, it implements the Linux syscall interface rather than Darwin's.

I agree with this. OS X is a flavor of BSD. I've learned that it's often more helpful to search for "<thing I want to do> bash BSD" than it is to search for "<thing I want to do> bash OS X".

Making "Winbuntu" a fully compatible Ubuntu sounds like a really lofty goal, especially when it comes to things that expect a Linux file system.

I guess for me, it's easier to reason about Linux in a VM (or maybe a container), with all the limitations of that approach, than it is to wonder what surprise might occur as a result of trying to run something on Winbuntu. At some point maybe that will shift. It's not like VMs are exactly like bare metal.

Keeping trying hard Microsoft! I like Winbuntu enough that I bought a Windows 10 laptop just to play with it! Emphasis on play, not seriously use.

I've been using WSL since it was released to the fast insider ring. It's pretty slick. There have been some warts and growing pains, but the team has been very responsive to bug reports. I've seen responses as quickly as 2 public build cycles (about a week) to get a fix for an issue reported on their github site.

I love watching people developing on OS X, targeting Linux, without proper tests forgetting that Linux's FS's are by default case-sensitive in regards to file names, and completely forgetting that OS-X is case-insensitive, by default (and recommended to remain so, because most OS-X software is not developed with case-sensitive file-system awareness.)

>OS-X is case-insensitive, by default (and recommended to remain so, because most OS-X software is not developed with case-sensitive file-system awareness.)

A few years back, following my previous laptop which had been a flimsy Acer running Ubuntu which became unusable following malfunction of the fan, I was looking for a more sturdy laptop and ended up buying a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro which came with OS X Mountain Lion I think it was. Being used to case-sensitivity from various Linux distros and on my FreeBSD servers, I decided to enable case-sensitivity for the system drive. That turned out to be quite a mistake indeed. Several pieces of software were unable to find the files they needed, so I ended up reinstalling the whole system shortly after, this time without case-sensitivity.

Following that I had a hardware problem that the Apple authorized repairshops I went to were unable to fix three times in a row so I ended up demanding a refund (Norwegian customer protection laws are good in this regard), and while I still think OS X is an impressive system I lost a bit of my respect for Apple after that experience. (I enjoy my iPod touch though.) Anyway, the reason I mention this is just to say, I don't know if case-sensitivity remains problematic in macOS. I find it highly likely that it still is though.

Can't wait to run docker in this. Will save me countless development hours.

I was already a fan of colinux back then but this has te potential of being infinitely better.

You can actually manage/control Docker for Windows (upon which you can run Windows & Linux containers) from your Docker client running in Bash (or Windows) on the same box.

Inception ... noitpecnI ;)

They are for one part of the tech industry (which I count myself in) but it's pretty obvious that for many others, Microsoft-based tech (which now runs everywhere) is a standard. Why not persue both?

Why wouldn't getting as close to 100% compatibility as possible be the aim? WSL is currently beta. The installation documentation has a big warning at the top that functionality is currently incomplete.

All I can say is that the first two things I tried on the Windows Linux Subsystem didn't work, mainly running Elixir and Debootstrap. It's okay that they aren't (yet?) supported, but something that looks & smells like Ubuntu, yet isn't, doesn't inspire confidence that it can be trusted to act like Ubuntu.

An alternative approach would be to call it Winbuntu, Winux, or simply Ubuntu for <windows subsystem architecture>. Then aggressively maintain a list of known compatibility issues, and stay on top of fixing them. Maybe even open source it?! A close sourced, not-quite-what-I-wanted solution is simply less interesting to me.

I'm not sure a public-facing curated list of specific compatibility issues would be practical at this stage of the project's life; it's changing fairly rapidly. FWIW, the bug tracker is public, and the team seems to be fairly responsive; a UPX Compression bug I ran into was tagged fixinbound within a couple weeks. https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows

The speed at which they can push new builds to people who aren't on Windows Insider is a bit unfortunate, though.

> All I can say is that the first two things I tried on the Windows Linux Subsystem didn't work, mainly running Elixir and Debootstrap. It's okay that they aren't (yet?) supported, but something that looks & smells like Ubuntu, yet isn't, doesn't inspire confidence that it can be trusted to act like Ubuntu.

You need to handle this anyways, as it's unlikely that your target deploy platform will always be ubuntu. In any case, you can just use docker like most OSX folks do now.

I'm not familiar with Elixir or Debootstrap (I'm guessing web-oriented)? But, I've had great success with using WSL for C++ oriented projects, building with both g++ & clang. Only issue in that regard I've had is that the emulated syscalls cannot currently enumerate ethernet devices. The calls are implemented, but fail at runtime currently. I've not yet filed a bug report, because I don't know how it should perform.

You should be able to enumerate network connections on recent Insider builds ... or on Creators Update when it arrives in ... well ... "Soon™" :)

I don't think they can open source WSL in any useful capacity because it's signed as part of the kernel itself - afaict this is also why an update to WSL is an update to the Windows build itself.