I Am Excited About Ubuntu Coming Atop Windows 10

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 5 April 2016 at 08:27 AM EDT. 27 Comments
UBUNTU
Now that a few days have passed since it was announced that Microsoft and Canonical had brought the Ubuntu user-space to run on Windows 10 and I've had more time to read about it, I remain excited about being able to run some Ubuntu user-space applications on Windows 10.

...of course, with not regularly running Windows 10, my excitement about it comes down to the prospects of benchmarking! Being able to benchmark the Ubuntu user-space on Windows 10 x64 and compare it to the Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 results on a clean install (currently the Ubuntu Windows packages are based on 14.04 LTS but will be re-based to 16.04 LTS). This should be fun for benchmarking and be interesting to see the difference with the same user-space components but seeing how the native Linux experience compares to Microsoft's Linux subsystem and their kernel.


The Phoronix Test Suite has support for Windows going back years, but it's been limited by the number of test profiles currently ported to Windows (only a few, that I generally do in my limited spare time and mostly just when wanting to run Linux vs. Windows graphics tests). But with this Ubuntu for Windows 10 should be able to run a full arsenal of Linux CLI benchmarks in a fully-automated and reproducible manner in a way that can then be compared to the virgin Ubuntu results on the same systems -- that is, if this Linux subsystem for Windows is as good as Microsoft purports.

So yes, my excitement over Ubuntu for Windows 10 comes down to benchmarking and look forward to starting the benchmarks as soon as getting access to it.

Outside of that, in a Phoronix Twitter poll from a few days ago, 33% were excited about Ubuntu for Windows while 29% wished to "kill it with fire" and an additional 27% were no/neutral over the matter.



Now that you've had a few days to settle down following Microsoft's announcement last week, what are you thinking about their Linux subsystem for Windows? Let us know over in our forums.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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