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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Some choice quotes from: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.htm...

"Nope! This isn't a container either. It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows."

"Oh, and it's totally shit hot! The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance."

Full access to all of Ubuntu user space inc. 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...

And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives.

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Is there any way this is bad? I am honestly having a hard time not getting thrilled over it. I want to be cynical and worried, but hot damn this seems awesome. Getting that alphabet soup of utilities to be useful natively on Windows without Cygwin or `git bash` is a pain (and usually lags out of date; nevermind the startup lag too).

Just having curl, md5sum, and apt alone is a thrill and a half!

Totally agree. I use git for windows with optional unix tools. But having this built in is quite amazing.

Being able to run Linux binaries natively on Windows is nothing new.

CoLinux did it somewhat poorly but garnered a bit of popularity. http://atratus.org did it too. FreeBSD (and maybe the other BSDs?) have first party Linux emulation which isn't entirely trivial, as you still have to write effectively the same stuff. (ELF binaries to be interpretted on a COFF/PE binary platform for Windows; the FBSD guys wrote an entire layer that maintained the SysV COFF a.out standard while concurrently allowing you run the more modern ELF binary standard circa version 4.3.)

Windows also has had first party access to all of those utils via the `gow'[1] package. In ConEmu it looks pretty nifty too. (Not that you really need it since the whole MSbuild chain is now 100% open, but yeah not having to fight against Cygwin and mingw32 for hours as one had to 10 years ago is quite nice.)

[1] https://chocolatey.org/packages/Gow

I wonder how the Cygwin people feel? It would seem to me, and I'm a very long time Cygwin user (from before Red Hat bought them), that it makes Cygwin obsolete.

Docker?

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