Would you like some Linux with your Windows 10?
This is NOT an April’s fool prank: Microsoft is planning to integrate GNU’s Bash shell, within Windows 10.
While Windows 10’s default developer terminal client is PowerShell, as it has always been in previous versions of Microsoft Windows, a natively available Ubuntu Linux environment will be soon be part of Windows 10, without the need of emulators or virtual machines. In fact, Linux will exist, within Windows 10, as a subsystem, thanks to Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux.
Developers will be able to write and edit their .sh Bash scripts, using Emacs, directly from Windows 10. This turn of events was to be expected, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision is to enable developers to use Windows, to create applications for every competing platform, including Linux, Android and Mac OS X.
This is not the first sign of Microsoft’s willful cooperation with Linux, its former open source rival platform, as Microsoft has offered support for Ubuntu Linux on Azure for quite some time, with plans of porting its Microsoft SQL relational database platform to Linux.
The update will reach Windows Insiders as soon as the Spring, while regular users will be able to get the Bash shell with the Summer’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update, with word of other shells coming to Windows 10 as time goes by.
Michael Shuttleworth, the founder and CEO of Canonical, went on record saying that “...The native availability of a full Ubuntu environment on Windows, without virtualization or emulation, is a milestone that defies convention and a gateway to fascinatingly unfamiliar territory...”.
The announcement was made during the Microsoft Build keynote for developers. Kevin Gallo, Corporate VP of Windows and Devices at Microsoft, introduced a number of demo applications, showing how easy and seamless it is to edit scripts using Emacs and SSH from Bash, to create and enhance applications and websites.
Once again, this is the actual Bash environment, which, according to what we have seen at the keynote, can be run as easily as firing up bash.exe from Windows 10 system apps folder.
Microsoft seems to be fully committed to promoting Windows 10 as the best platform for developers, by enabling them to create applications that run on all platforms, and that can be easily ported to the Windows Store using conversion tools available from Visual Studio. Even further, Visual Studio allows to test applications using iOS and Android emulators, as well as Windows 10 Mobile. This way, no matter whether the target audience is Mac users, Android users, Google Chrome OS users, or users of Windows 10, the same applications can be ported easily and efficiently, to all platforms.