Bash is coming to Windows 10!

[Danfun64]

If you haven't heard, Microsoft has created Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically ports parts of Ubuntu into Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. Imagine being able to use bash, apt-get, make, and other command line Ubuntu programs in Windows natively...

Now what I want to know is, how is this going to effect msys, cygwin, and mingw-w64? Are people going to compile windows software in windows 10 AE (coining that initial here, folks :P) using ubuntu's mingw-w64?

[Tiger]

I am actually excited about that feature!

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-demos-bash-running-on-windows-10

[Cire]

That's pretty cool!
Even though not the same, it makes me Think of ReactOS, which I've been following since 2005. I really hope that will be a success someday.

[Coraline]

Yeah I am excited for this. Whether it becomes a total replacement for MinGW is another thing.

[neubejiita]

I have got it working, but I cannot find a network interface, so I cannot ping websites. Although by adding entries to the /etc/hosts file I could run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. But this is good for practicing Bash commands, but not much else. There is not a full implementation of the Linux system, so a lot of commands that use /proc do not work as /proc is not mounted, and even if you mount it they still do not work. This needs a lot more work before it is as good as Ubuntu running in a VMware instance or using a Cloud Amazon AWS instance for Linux work. Better to stick with running Debian natively or using VMware.

[VGamingJunkie]

Sounds interesting.

[chungy]

Chu said:

Yeah I am excited for this. Whether it becomes a total replacement for MinGW is another thing.

No, MinGW is a toolchain for building Windows binaries. What might actually be a question is whether it becomes a total replacement for environments like Cygwin and MSYS that re-implement Unix APIs and programs on top of Win32. If Windows 10 can run regular Linux binaries, you might find you no longer need nor want to have such abstraction layers (indeed, you would pretty much just run the Linux version of MinGW on top of Windows 10).

[Blastfrog]

I'll bet the free software community is a little wary of this.

[hex11]

Sodaholic said:

I'll bet the free software community is a little wary of this.

I've been wary of bash for a long time. It's kinda like ZDoom for the Unix shell. You end up with all these bash-ism problems.

[Graf Zahl]

This may actually be a good thing if it ultimately leads to less dependence on Windows.