Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other Linux tools? Dreamland.

Serious, non-snarky question:

What does this give you that you would not already have with cygwin? The latter installs .exe versions of the usual command line utils, and I'm almost certain ZSH and the others you speak of are included.

I do not understand the practical implications of this move by Canonical/MS other than PR - what's actually changing from a user/dev standpoint?

Cygwin is and always will be only an emulation-layer, never the real deal. For most day-to-day things it works perfectly, but when you run into some corner-case, most of the time you are out of luck.

My only real problem with Cygwin is, that it misses a command-line package manager. If they could adopt pacman for package management like MSYS2 does, I'd be a happy camper.

edit: To deploy Cygwin based applications you need to get a commercial license from RedHat (if it's not FOSS). Which could be a deal-breaker.

You realize cygwin's setup.exe package manager has a CLI, right? The issue with pacman in msys2 is that it's posix dependent, which fails badly at updating the core posix layer itself. Cygwin's setup.exe is a native Windows executable and doesn't have this self hosting problem.

That doesn't solve the problem that if it is trying to update the Cygwin DLL, you need to shut down everything. And if there's an update to something like bash or coreutils, same thing (since Windows does not allow writing to executables that are running).