Ubuntu on Windows

I'm not being deliberately obtuse: I don't really understand how this helps anyone particularly much.

(OK, I assume there's a small number of developers who develop, or at least debug, for both systems and prefer windows as a development environment, but I assume that number is small, at least on Microsoft's scale).

If you're developing to deploy on Linux but are more of a Windows dev, this helps you, but that doesn't help Microsoft ship more server OS licenses.

If you're a Windows dev this is irrelevant.

If you're a linux (or posix only) dev I don't see how this helps you much. It does help a person like me, who only uses Windows when I need some weird tool like a compiler for an exotic embedded part or vendor-supplied FPGA tool that only works under Windows -- again, not a large enough market t move the needle.

Could the market be CIOs? I.e. demonstrating "hipness" in a way that can be verified when the CIO asks the devs "does this really work the way MS claims?"

Obviously it's not opening the huge number of popular Linux desktop apps to the Windows environment. :-(

Never having to run Cygwin again sounds pretty great to me!

> If you're developing to deploy on Linux but are more of a Windows dev, this helps you, but that doesn't help Microsoft ship more server OS licenses.

Could it be something to do with helping Microsoft sign up more Azure customers using Linux? Windows dev, Linux on Azure deploy, end to end Microsoft.

I work on a platform agnostic python tool. It's just so much easier developing python on a nix system, but I'm restricted to either an old version of enterprise linux or OSX. I love linux, but I don't love having to customize everything to get a workable environment. I tolerate OSX, but if it wasn't nix I would never touch it.

Now Windows has some pretty major issues (utf-8 in CMD is agonizing), but it comes out of the box more usable (to me) than either OSX or the vast majority of linux distros. If I can have my nice window management and also the ubuntu user space, I'll be a very happy camper.

One of the things that excited me most about this is the ability to ssh. I have a feeling that is going to be incredibly useful instead of having to use PuTTY or some other client.

It will help me.

I work for a big consulting company - 70k employees. Corporate standard is a Windows laptop for everyone. But, most software development is done for Linux environments.

I hate windows scripting / powershell, so I use cygwin a lot. I don't love cygwin, but it's my "least worst" option. Local linux VMs are too heavy.

So, I'm excited about the option to have a 'real' linux locally, with a working package manager.

ssh is, itself, just "some other client".

I suspect that you meant some other graphical user interface SSH client, as opposed to a TUI client like ssh. Yes, a TUI SSH client is useful. I've been using one with SFU/SFUA on a Windows 7 Ultimate machine for some years.