In many ways my involvement with Microsoft's beta testing of Windows 10 has been surprising. If they can accomplish all they say they want to do, it will be an amazing operating system. The latest beta release, build 14342, comes with some new features only available to us Insiders in the fast ring. One new concept has really gained my interest like no other aspect of Windows 10 has in the past: Bash on Windows.
Redmond is experimenting with ways to run Linux/UNIX programs directly from within Windows. The concept actually is not new to WIndows. There is a little history in this BACKGROUND ARTICLE that explains how this all came about. There always has been subsystem capability in the WIndows kernel mostly intended for use with Win32, POSIX and OS/2. Thus, a subsystem for a Linux OS is simply a variation of the existing NT architecture.
Windows 7 Ultimate has a Linux compiler available for Linux source code. Thus any Linux program can be compiled to run in Windows 7 directly. This is cool, but even the extreme geek inside me shied away from it. It appeared to be way too complicated. The folks behind Windows 10 decided to develop a Linux subsystem with a fully functional version of Ubuntu (14.04 LTS) under the hood. This is not a virtual machine nor emulation of any kind. All the native Linux commands and system calls get fed to the Windows kernel via what they call Pico Processes. Thus Widows 10 does all the conversions necessary to make Ubuntu functional in it's native mode. Linux, on the other hand, does the exact same things with abstraction layers in WINE. You can run any Windows program on Linux via WINE. The question always has been, "why would you want to?" but still. Thus there is now parity given that Windows can run on Linux and Linux can run on Windows.
At this stage of the game it's all beta and crude. Not even all us beta testers are being offered the opportunity to examine the Linux subsystem. It's very early in development and a few critical things don't work or are not even available - no Xterm included yet, for example. However, the intent of Microsoft has become clear. A truce has been declared and in the near future Windows 10 users will be able to run Linux programs natively. But, why would they want to?
