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Comment by dump121 | Hacker News Reader

Strategic View is simple I believe, they want developers back in there fold. MS sells Windows and most devs have no problem with its UI but want to use linux CLI, also some new tools/languages are developed only/first for Linux. Now OSX being compatible has captured this lucrative marketshare.

Having good developers using Windows will be a great boost for ecosystem, a percentage may choose to experiment with UWP, a react-native developer may try a Windows version of app.

Only thing to loose is people may not build cli tools for Windows, but that is already a lost cause. Linux won't pose a threat to GUI, so no chance of non developers getting comfortable and migrating to Linux. So win-win and later some more win.

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This is exactly me. When I can start running Linux(-ish) command line tools in Windows, I'll ditch my Macbook for a Dell in a hot second..

Here's a question though that I seem to not see answered (but maybe I'm not reading enough):

Can I run MariaDB or nginx or other "servers" in this environment? Or does that stuff not work?

You can certainly run MariaDB. All you need to do is "apt-get install mariadb-server". The Linux subsystem is the entire Ubuntu 14.04 system. I love my Surface Pro 4 with latest Windows 10 release, only 1 week or so to go before its outside preview program. Look forward to see what Devs come up with. Some of the cooler stuff I've seen is using the Linux shell with Visual Studio Code as the shell on a windows system.

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to. Then again, some tools don't seem to work for some inexplicable reason (ex screen).

I haven't tried W10 at all, but it's likely they didn't implement all of the terminal features required by screen, or that they did, but $TERM is set to something not recognized by [the terminal library that presumably underpins] screen.

For any new programmers who want to learn more, search for "ANSI escape codes", VT100, "terminal emulation", termcap, and terminfo. Maybe add curses and pseudoterminal for extra credit.

And WSL could potentially be a much better experience than OS X's "real Unix" with Homebrew and etc.

The paths and base configuration will match your production environment, no worries about version mismatches or missing extensions. Ubuntu packages generally come with a sane and ready-to-run configuration, with service scripts and the like. (I use pkgsrc which seems more polished than Homebrew, but the installing experience is still not as nice as Ubuntu. Maybe someone will make a "Linux subsystem for Mac"...)

If anything this helps Linux because it cements popular Linux distros as the default *nix environments.

I think "Linux subsystem for Mac" is stuff like Vagrant, where you can still work on your dev projects locally/natively but they're shared into a Linux environment that can be set up to mimic your production environments..

This can be done today on Windows too of course, even without this new fancy thing.

Sure, the serious use case is a VM or Docker or etcetera-virtual based solution. However I must have a couple dozen maintenance-mode projects on my system and there's a certain appeal to alt-tabbing from MS Excel or Photoshop to a console window and typing `service start foo` (or the launchd equivalent).

There are still a gazillion people using WAMP (and so on) as a bad impersonation of their production environment, so this fills a role.

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