[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

As I understand it, some userland programs for their Linux developers working on their cloud services. Running on Win10.

At present, yes, though I believe more extensive support is planned down the road.

The key here is Linux support libraries that will be part of a Win10 upgrade.

I had a Unix machine at home before I got a PC running MSDOS, and spent time and effort trying to make the PC look and act as much like the Unix machine as possible. The eventual solution was a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit, that offered all of the Unix commands that made sense in a single-user, single tasking OS like DOS. The selling point here was a complete implementation of the Korn shell. Running under the MKS Korn shell, you had to dig a bit to discover it wasn't a Unix machine.

I kept up the effort when I moved to Windows, and at various times ran Microsoft's Service for Unix (based on Interix, which had roots in the MKS product), AT&T's UWin, and Cygwin, which ported the Gnu Linux toolchain including GCC to Windows. UWin and Cygwin both implemented POSIX compatibility layers encapsulated as DLLs. A lot of *nix code builds "out of the box" under Cygwin because it links against the DLL and sees the *nix system calls it expects.

But that sort of arrangement carries a penalty in speed and complexity of environment. These days, I run "native" Win32 ports of Linux commands built with MinGW, a version of GCC set up to build using native Windows runtimes. (Git for Windows includes a pretty complete set, including the bash shell.)

With underlying support for *nix code built into Win10, an assortment of things become possible, including full Ubuntu running alongside Win10 without using a VM. Down the road, I expect to see actual container support in Windows, but that will take a bit, and isn't the direction Canonical took for this effort.
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Dennis