Ubuntu's User-Space Ported To Run On Windows 10 By Canonical/Microsoft

Canonical and Microsoft have been working on a joint project the past few months of bringing the Ubuntu user-space to Windows 10 as an initiative for helping developers running this OS.

The Ubuntu user-space complete with the Bash shell and common command-line utilities -- even apt-get, Apache, GCC, and other common Ubuntu packages -- all can be deployed on Windows 10 without any use of containers or VMs.

This is basically, Ubuntu user-space packages running natively on Windows 10 by Microsoft coming up with real-time translation of Linux system calls into Windows system calls. It's like the opposite of the Wine project for running Windows apps on Linux -- this is Linux on Windows. Simply typing "bash" on Windows 10 with the necessary support will launch a console window powered by Ubuntu's user-space.

This technology is currently in early beta via the Windows Store and based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. However, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be available in time atop Windows 10. More details via this blog post by Canonical's Dustin Kirkland with the information going public this week at Microsoft's BUILD conference.