Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, and Microsoft, you'll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10. This will be more than just running the Bash shell on Windows 10. After all, thanks to programs such as Cygwin or MSYS utilities, hardcore Unix users have long been able to run the popular Bash command line interface (CLI) on Windows. With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10. The details won't be revealed until tomorrow's morning keynote speech at Microsoft Build...


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Let's hope they don't do the opposite now.

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This is interesting as hell.

At the same time, my GNU/Linux purist is having a stroke right now.

It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.

So it sounds a bit like they're just doing a more official cygwin sort of thing. Which doesn't bode well for us.

Also, if the info is correct, the title is very misleading. They're not bringing Ubuntu to win10, they're bringing GNU tools to win10. Which I can't imagine Stallman is happy about.

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This is fucking horrifying. Canonical better work out a deal that will be beneficial for the GNU/Linux world. Though I don't know how many people this will actually prevent from moving to GNU/Linux. And as @SgtAwesomesauce said RMS will most likely be very displeased about this

I'm not sure how this would benefit in any way the GNU/Linux ecosystem. It only gives developers an excuse to stay on windows. "well, windows has grep, autoconf, awk, sed and make now, so I don't need Linux"

Exactly and that's why I said canonical should work out a deal. Maybe they could get M$ to port over some of their shit. I don't think they'll do it but Canonical needs to be able to give their own community something back. But I don't think this will actually give devs any excuse because most of the devs who benefit from these tools probably use linux or cygwjn anyway

What specifically do you suggest they port? They're already porting MSSQL, and aside from maybe office, I don't see anything that's worth porting to GNU/Linux, because we've already got a good alternative for almost everything. I mean, for God's sake, Samba 4 does a better job at AD than server 2012 does.

Don't get me wrong, I want them to give back, I just don't know what they have to offer.

Let's hope it not one of their "Embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
"Why use Linux when you can you can use Linux in Windows?"

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Ugh, I hope this doesn't turn into a "Cortana to start shipping with Ubuntu" thing. Not really the same, but after M$ investment in Cyanogenmod, that's what happened.

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Very true, I keep forgetting how good the Linux Software Alternatives have become. There probably is very little which we could get fr M$

Time to never use ubuntu again.

Netrunner arch to the rescue :U

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Good thing I only used Ubuntu for a short time and once I managed to install it I started using and loving Arch. Now I'm on Gentoo (and frankly I don't quite love it yet. I don't know why I started loving arch this quickly but not Gentoo) and this has sealed my decision of never going back to Ubuntu and installing CentOS on my server

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I'm pretty sure Canonical is smarter than that. I really hope this doesn't happen, but still, It's Ubuntu, the Apple of GNU/Linux... Who knows what they're capable of.

@HimTortons I'd like a look behind their Azure architecture, but that's never going to happen. I'd like them to fold or maybe start developing for open source.

@FaunCB That's the thing. Ubuntu keeps doing shit like this and it's driving them into the ground. Ubuntu 8.04 was, in my opinion, the peak of their success. They were awesome back then, and now they're trying so hard to differentiate themselves from the other distros that they forget what they are: a strong GNU/Linux distribution that could be a real force of good in the world.

@HimTortons As far as Gentoo goes, I used it before Arch, and settled on Arch because while Gentoo is a nice concept, portage breaks too often (not in the first month, but when you try to do major upgrades), is too complicated, and takes for fucking ever to install shit. Just because you have source code doesn't mean you need to compile from it. There's binaries out there too. You'll learn a lot about GNU/Linux from Gentoo, but I can't recommend it as much more than a toy, because of all the inefficiencies with it that arch addresses. But that's just my opinion. Do what you love.

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Well my problem is that I don't know how much more time I'm going to give Gentoo. I want to love and use it but right now I'm just having some issues. The fact that right I'm on a vacation and I've that feeling that when I get home something will be broken us proof of that. I might just give it 2 more months and then I'll decide whether I'll return to Arch or keep using Gentoo. But enough of that, I'm going off topic.
I'd actually love to see M$ develop open source software but I don't think that's gonna happen either. Azure is also something I'd be interested in (I mean do we even know anything about it yet? Though now we know thats it's most likely based on Ubuntu) but that's something thats going to stay concealed as well

Well, Azure is their response to Amazon's AWS. It's good, but I'd like to poke around on the back-end of it, because I've always had a passing interest in setting something like that up.

Next time I get a few spare million, I think I'll build a couple datacenters. /s

With this report, it probably is based on ubuntu, seeing how MS and Canonical are obviously working together. We will probably hear something about it tomorrow, well, technically today. Anyways. I've got work in the morning. I've got to head off for the night.

RMS is fine with running free software on a non-free OS. He has said in the past that running free or libre tools on a proprietary OS is better than nothing and a stepping stone in the right direction. What he would be concerned about is if this move further eroded getting the message across to people e.g. people will stay on their non-free platforms and won't care their hardware/OS is treacherous. It's probably best to read one of his own essays on such things; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

Also GNU tools were ported to Windows long ago; http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

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It would only be worth it if the trade was for open source directX

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I just started on Gentoo as well, Sabayon with plasma 5 is a great looking version. I need to get used to Entropy though, after only using Apt in Mint for the last few years.

Azure is mostly built on virtual machines that run off a fork of Hyper-V. A few of the SaaS offerings have Open Source underpinnings and we now know that Microsoft rolled their own GNU/Linux to handle some of the networking infrastructure.

I doubt we'll ever know much more than that but if you want to roll your own Azure Microsoft now offer the Azure Stack which you can deploy onto your own hardware. It's currently only preview and for use on a single server:

fhk just proves my point to my coder friend windows is going unix and windows 10 is unix after all just not open. and this is why windows 10 was given away for free for a year. and gives keys to all users that download the install ISO for there website. and how azure was unix running a windows desktop.