Windows 10 Insider Update Now Ships Ubuntu Bash For Windows

[nanonyme]

Depends on the APIs. C drive will be mounted somewhere with something like "/mnt/c/Program Files/" so simple file handling should be straight forward. chmod and chown will probably only modify ownership*, but windows permissions model isn't group based so things might get tricky. X server is likely out of the question for now. There will likely be some fancy virtualization stuff like containers that won't work; At least at first. Kernel IPCs might need different optimizations since sockets and buses would be equally handled regarding overhead in the NT microkernel. Split stacks and garbage collectors might have extra overhead depending on what algorithm they opted for the heap allocation. Interrupt handling will carry an indirection. Some assembly won't...

Overall, I think 99% of what people have in mind should work more or less as is and run fine. But we'll see soon enough...

*Edit: Just remembered CIFS solves this somehow so it's probably going to work fine.

2nd Edit: I forgot the most important thing: mutlithreading. Windows always had horrible overhead for creating more threads and processes. If this is handled well now, it might drive a whole lot of attention from developers. Definitely one of the first things to look out for.

Not true. Windows has plenty of group-based permissions. The real problem is the naive POSIX permission model doesn't map well with the one in Windows. It would map better with Linux ACL's

[nanonyme]

I'm reiterating as can't edit with cell phone: Windows file permission system is reasonably similar to Linux ACL's

[chithanh]

Yeah, this FUD totally hasn't been beaten to death, please keep reminding us with each and every article related to Windows 10 in any way.

This isn't FUD. If you accept the terms of the Insider program, you grant Microsoft the right to monitor the things you do on the computer, including keystrokes. Many people are unaware of this and may miss it when they blindly accept the EULA.
Whether Microsoft will actually use this right is another question, but their past actions (snooping around in Hotmail and Skype conversations) don't instill much confidence.

[Michael]

so far haven't got the update pushed down... I joined insider program and set it to fast updates, but it says it could take a while before changes apply. Hopefully by the morning the update will be downloaded.

[Guest]

Wow. I did not know about the keylogger issue. That is huge - even if it was only in the technical preview, this is something that Microsoft needs to highlight in big red bold letters, not just in the terms of use/license agreement. I'm surprised that there was no anti-trust case for this, compared to bundling Internet Explorer along with Windows.

[devius]

I'm surprised that there was no anti-trust case for this, compared to bundling Internet Explorer along with Windows.

Including a keylogger in Windows isn't causing Windows to become a monopoly in the keylogging business or abusing that monopoly to restrict the market for other keyloggers, therefore eliminating competition in that area through the use of a dominant position.

[Guest]

Including a keylogger in Windows isn't causing Windows to become a monopoly in the keylogging business or abusing that monopoly to restrict the market for other keyloggers, therefore eliminating competition in that area through the use of a dominant position.

Yeah, anti-trust is probably not the word I was looking for. But there should be some kind of investigation.

Technically though, Microsoft could become a monopoly in the keylogging business, if Windows 10 were to include a keylogger.

[Amarildo]

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

On one side, users could use primarily Windows as their host OS since installing Ubuntu side-by-side isn't necessary anymore.

On the other side, this could expose Linux more, and Windows users (who try this) could realize that Linux is a good platform and move to Linux permanently.

[DrYak]

This also interests me from a professional point of view:

- In scientific research we do a lot of data processing using very UNIX-oriented software.
(Our cluster is 100% running Linux, mostly CentOS)

- There's some pre-processing that is cheap and could be done on the user's desktop/laptop.
Making such a preprocessor on Linux is a piece of cake.
Making it available on Mac OS X isn't impossible (baring some of the Apple specific walled garden weirdness - the rest is pretty much UNIX under the hood).
Making it available on Windows on the other hand is a world of tears. (Currently, our devs have decided to save their sanity, focus on the Linux & Mac OS X versions, and provide a VM for Windows users).

I wonder if, in the long term, as more and more of ubuntu userland becomes available in windows, maybe we'll be able to have it easier making Windows port of the preprocessing tools.

[aht0]

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

On one side, users could use primarily Windows as their host OS since installing Ubuntu side-by-side isn't necessary anymore.

On the other side, this could expose Linux more, and Windows users (who try this) could realize that Linux is a good platform and move to Linux permanently.

User-tracking, keylogging etc..

What makes you so sure that sooner or later Linux would not follow in Microsoft steps. Push for profit remains identical for megacorporation behind Windows and business oriented corporations behind Linux.

First shy attempts have already happened. More specifically Ubuntu and it's tracking for Unity Dash Amazon searches.Tracking like this is something that Windows users do not even think of much, it's just so commonplace. Since the average computer user does not seem to mind the constant surveillance, what would stop corporations behind Linux to expand in this direction? Motivation is there: extra profit after all.

I would predict Linux ending up sort of hybrid between Android and Windows. At least certain distributions backed and developed by commercial entities. Android because of massive marketing in it, Windows because of ever increasing integration with systemd (reminds me a lot svchost.exe in windows) and thus decreasing modularity.