Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

Oh, another subsystem. Yay, good for Microsoft. The problem with the subsystem approach is that it's hard to get programs running in the subsystem to interact with the desktop world, which is win32. What I like about Cygwin is that the programs that run under it are win32 programs: they can equally well use CreateWindow and ppoll. Cygwin programs understand NT permissions.

It's always been possible to run Linux programs under Windows: just run a VM. What Microsoft has done here makes it less painful to run Linux programs, sure, but these programs still exist in their own little world. Cygwin programs, on the other hand, are Windows programs. To me, that makes them much more useful.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the new Linux subsystem is more tightly integrated with the rest of the system than I'm guessing. But based on the available documentation, it looks a lot more like SFU or Interix than it does Cygwin, and that's a shame, because if I'm right, Microsoft misunderstood the whole point of Cygwin. Again.

In my perspective, this Linux subsystem are very useful for running server components like redis, or nginx which doesn't have official windows build. So you can develop server apps which will run on Linux prod, but develop it with Windows

Unless I can fire up windbg and point them at these binaries (which would involve teaching dbghelp to read DWARF, and be useful in its own right), I still don't see much of a point. I can always just use a lightweight VM, and paravirtualized cross-VM filesystem access already exists.

> Cygwin programs understand NT permissions.

Windows NT POSIX subsystem programs understand NT permissions, too. There's quite a lot about it in the Interix doco, explaining how ACEs are mapped and so forth. This is not a problem with the subsystem approach, demonstrably.

You're rather presuming that one would use windbg. That's an unwarranted assumption, given that the hypothetical developer here who is developing server apps using redis and nginx "with Windows, for Linux prod" is likely to think of gdb as the debugger.

Of course, whether gdb would work is something that we haven't yet been shown.