So does anyone want to speculate on the “angle” here for MS? Superficially it seems to be about getting developers to run Windows, even if they’re working in ecosystems that don’t run well on Windows. For example, I use Dart a lot and I tried to set it up on Windows once so I could iterate on an IE bug more efficiently but it was a huge hassle. With WSL it would be no problem (I think). But is that really it? That just seems kind of… boring?
I was wondering the exact same thing. I figured it could be to do with the fact that at pretty much any tech conference 9/10 people have a Macbook. Maybe MS are trying to win back some of the developer market share?
Microsoft has a serious Linux hosting offer on Azure and would like to keep developers developing for that ecosystem on Windows.
For example, imagine developing a .NET application integrating into a Linux backend - this allows to emulate that quite easily without using VMs. Considering that Microsoft was always know for having great dev tooling through Visual Studio, I would imagine that extending integration into it would be a next step.
Windows server still drives a fair bit of revenue for MS.
When people started seeing substantial cost savings by adopting cooperatively scheduled containers (eg docker), MS moved pretty hard towards WSL and docker support.
My theory is they got scared that server software would move to a deployment model that wouldn’t support Windows at all.
IIRC, it sprung from an attempt for an Android subsystem for Windows 10 Mobile. When the compatibility layer didn’t work out and W10M isn’t doing so hot, why not retool it for something else?
Does anyone happen to know if it’s now possible to “get into” the Linux subsystem from anything other than the MS bash.exe? I failed to get the Windows version of Emacs to spawn a bash shell, for instance.
So does anyone want to speculate on the “angle” here for MS? Superficially it seems to be about getting developers to run Windows, even if they’re working in ecosystems that don’t run well on Windows. For example, I use Dart a lot and I tried to set it up on Windows once so I could iterate on an IE bug more efficiently but it was a huge hassle. With WSL it would be no problem (I think). But is that really it? That just seems kind of… boring?
I was wondering the exact same thing. I figured it could be to do with the fact that at pretty much any tech conference 9/10 people have a Macbook. Maybe MS are trying to win back some of the developer market share?
Yes, exactly, given that most developers already need *nix tools and run either msys or cygwin it’s a natural move to emulate Linux kernel.
Additionally Microsoft seems to build some serious emulation knowledge (x86 on ARM etc.)
Microsoft has a serious Linux hosting offer on Azure and would like to keep developers developing for that ecosystem on Windows.
For example, imagine developing a .NET application integrating into a Linux backend - this allows to emulate that quite easily without using VMs. Considering that Microsoft was always know for having great dev tooling through Visual Studio, I would imagine that extending integration into it would be a next step.
Windows server still drives a fair bit of revenue for MS.
When people started seeing substantial cost savings by adopting cooperatively scheduled containers (eg docker), MS moved pretty hard towards WSL and docker support.
My theory is they got scared that server software would move to a deployment model that wouldn’t support Windows at all.
IIRC, it sprung from an attempt for an Android subsystem for Windows 10 Mobile. When the compatibility layer didn’t work out and W10M isn’t doing so hot, why not retool it for something else?
I don’t have the feeling “something failed, let’s just salvage it and do something else” is the Microsoft way of doing things.
Does anyone happen to know if it’s now possible to “get into” the Linux subsystem from anything other than the MS
bash.exe? I failed to get the Windows version of Emacs to spawn a bash shell, for instance.