Microsoft just announced that in the future Windows 10.1 update (called the 'Anniversary Update' or 'Win 10 Anniversary') will have a "Developer mode" you can enable, and one of the features will be that you can install Ubuntu on top of Win10, not in a VM, and that you can then run native Ubuntu apps directly in Win10.

They show themselves using Bash natively on Windows, and then using apt-get to natively get emacs and using emacs natively on windows, running the actual Ubuntu linux binaries - not ported binaries. Canonical (which partnered with Microsoft to implement it) explains it better.

What I'm not understanding is, does this apply to all Ubuntu applications (including ones with GUIs) or just the command-line ones?

They say Windows behind the scene is translating Ubuntu system calls into Windows system calls (Canonical calls it a "reverse Wine"), so I'm guessing they aren't implementing the whole X-Windows (or Mir, or whatever Ubuntu uses now) interface...

Basically, my question is, will I finally be able to run Valgrind natively on Windows? :wink:

There is no gui support. This is purely for command line apps - vi, git, gcc, ssh etc

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/C906

"Embedded linux" and CLIs are two different features.

What I'm not understanding is, does this apply to all Ubuntu applications (including ones with GUIs) or just the command-line ones?

The runtime environment is a stock vanilla Ubuntu Server image. It is headless: no GUI apps are installed. The target is cloud and IoT developers who need to use the Linux-based toolchains required to ply their trade.

You can use the usual apt-based tools to go ahead and install GUI apps, but given that there is no /dev/dri/card0 and no video device drivers, you may find they just don't work. There's some speculation that you can run a native X11 server on Windows (there are a number to choose from) and connect to that, but you're going to be missing all the fancy hardware acceleration and GPU support many apps rely on. We'll see what people can cobble together after June. There are a lot of endlessly creative and clever folks out there.

Disclaimer: I work for Canonical, but I have no inside information on this project.

This is great news. I don't care about the cloud, big data, Azure or all that nonsense, but Bash on Windows? Shut up and show me where to put my signature? :P

As far as I'm concerned, they may as well go all the way and replace the NT kernel with Linux and then port the Win32 API and the Universal Windows Platform. I don't actually dislike Windows, I think it's a great platform and gets blamed way too often when anything goes wrong, it's just that Unix-based platforms tend to get generally better development tools outside of Visual Studio, so if I get to run VS natively on Linux I would be one hell of an happy developer! :)

Nice to see that even Microsoft starts waking up, and adapting to how people want to work, instead of endlessly inventing new workflows and try to force them down the users throats.