Last week at Build 2017, Terry Myerson announced on stage that Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, would be coming to the Windows Store. Recently, Rich Turner, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, followed up on this big announcement by publishing a blog post highlighting what this announcement means for developers.
According to the post, Ubuntu’s availability in the Windows Store, and Suse and Fedora coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, means that developers will be able to enjoy faster and more reliable downloads. These developers will also be able to install Linux distributions to secondary fixed drives, and run different distributions more closely with production environments. Furthermore, developers will be able to run more than one distribution at a time, which is ideal for “working on systems that span different environments.” It is explained by Rich:
WSL [Windows Subsystem for Linux] was always designed to be distro-agnostic and this is the first time we’re exercising this aspect of the system. As always, we greatly appreciate any testing you can help us with, and if you find problems, please file bugs in our GitHub issues repo. We can’t wait to hear how you get on installing via the store and running different and multiple distros! These new features will arrive in an up-coming Windows Insider build. If you’d like to be among the first to try-out these new distros, be sure to sign-up for the Windows Insider program, and configure your Win10 machine to install fast-ring builds.
Are you excited to hear about the benefits of Ubuntu coming to the Windows Store? If you’re a developer, how will you be taking advantage of this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
