What does Ubuntu For Windows 10 Mean To End Users

Very recently, at Microsoft Build 2016, Microsoft announced that Ubuntu was coming to Windows 10. This is a huge announcement & since then, people have been talking about it. Most of the people are eager to get started with the build that supports UBUNTU, however, for the end users who do not know anything about UBUNTU except its name or LINUX origin, this news might be a cause for chaos. Ubuntu is a perfectly functional operating system in its own regard and it might make little sense to add one operating system to another.

To one’s surprise, this is not what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft is not simply merging the two operating systems or embedding one into another for that sake. . It is rather adding support for certain libraries and tools that developers need to use often. Confused?? Read out more…

What will Actually Happen?

UBUNTU coming to Windows means introduction of a command line, the LINUX command line i.e. bash would be added to Windows. It will allow users, developers specifically, to run bash commands and libraries on their Windows machines. . For an end user, Ubuntu coming to Windows is of little significance. It’s a feature that is tied to the Developer Mode and it’s the developer community that is going to milk the advantages.

How It Works

Microsoft has added new infrastructure called the Windows Subsystem for Linux, in order to add Ubuntu to Windows. Users (specially the developers) can turn on the “developer tools” in Windows 10 in order to get the tools. They can then use a Bash command to get an image of Ubuntu. The image would be downloaded via the command line but it actually comes from the Windows Store.

How this is Helpful to Developers?

Without this addition of UBUNTU to Windows, earlier, developers had to run UBUNTU in a virtual Machine or use the Cygwin environment in order to use bash libraries; Bash being a very popular among developers & a powerful tool. However, after this update, developers can routinely use Bash & many other Linux tools that have been made available to them; while working on windows. Makes life easy…doesn’t it?

Does It Effect End Users?

If you don’t know what is Bash, what is Linux command etc etc. are u going to use them? Even if you decide to turn on developer tools in Windows 10, there is no way you will accidentally end up using bash because of it. It’s a tool that is useful only to someone who knows how to use it and if that isn’t you that’s not going to matter at all because then you are not going to use it. However, it would be interesting to see how much of your system’s resource is consumed with this addition. I am sure Microsoft must have thought a way out!