Bash windows

31 march 2016, one day before April’s fool. My friend sent me this link (http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/30/11331014/microsoft-windows-linux-ubuntu-bash) about the new Microsoft and Canonical partnership to integrate the Ubuntu user-space into Microsoft windows 10.

Now developers can start using the Ubuntu bash inside windows 10. That’s exciting!! no?!

My first impression was “That’s a good step for Microsoft”, i started to remember my old windows days where i used to play some games, using the visual studio and Adobe suite, using my printer without worrying about the drivers… etc. Now on my Ubuntu machine i either need to have VM running windows where i can use Photoshop, “IE -_-” and different windows programs, or having a dual-boot Linux and Windows so you would be able to play games.

Now with this Windows Ubuntu integration i don’t have to use any VM or dual-boot, all in one place one machine. That’s really exciting WOW!… it’s kinda like apple’s mac os but more stable and with a huge community “Windows + Ubuntu community” that’s really awesome!!……..

But wait. wait a minute, how does this thing really work, based on the demo video from Microsoft, they have developed what they called a “subsystem” which is basically a translator between Ubuntu’s user-space and Windows NT kernel. So that means they have replaced the Linux kernel with windows kernel, that’s understandable because they won’t be able to use the Linux kernel unless they replace the NT kernel with it, which is not happening in 9000 years. Hmm so no more Linux kernel? anyone who is into linux would know that linux user-space is really dependent on the linux kernel and to replace the linux kernel with another kernel a good amount of changes on the user-space shall be done.

So would that lead us to a new Ubuntu distro that is made specially to run on NT’s kernel with the help of the subsystem?? and i will assume that this destro is maintained by Microsoft, Canonical and hopefully the “linux community”.

Because other than that if the “linux community” is not part of this project it won’t be an open source distro where things would be closed and this would lead to another scenario of open source abusing, where microsoft is trying to market it’s OS to developers through this integration. Which will lead to more sales and revenue for the bastards without giving back to the community or even making them part of it.

Lets assume that the last paragraph is not right, and the new distro would be open-sourced for community, we still have this subsystem that we don’t know how it works and without knowing how it works the community will end up with a hard time for contributing and bug fixing, it would end up with a scenario similar to the HAL( Hardware abstraction layer) issue with android unofficial builds, where contributors are struggling with making the different android modules (camera, wifi, gps.. etc) to work with their new ports such as CM. So unless Microsoft opens the subsystem for community this would lead us to the same scenario that Microsoft is the only beneficial of this integration…

Even if they opensource the subsystem.. this will lead us to the NT’s kernel which is closed as hell that would really make the contributors life hard

It’s sad to see how the opensource projects are being abused by those big sharks… i hope that it will turn to be an April's fool thing.

Oh one more thing, after watching the demo video.. the Microsoft guys stated “Please help us with your feedback, what works and what doesn't”!!! really! really Microsoft “feedback”!!, that’s a shame this is not how you approach the linux community. If you want to approach us, you need to say “Please help us with your contributions to our project repo”