14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s BUILD developer conference kicking off later today is expected to bring some very exciting news, at least according to the Redmond-based tech giant, who has been teasing us with an important announcement for quite some time.
And according to a new report by ZDNet, this big announcement is very likely to be a partnership between Canonical and Microsoft, which would, in the end, have the goal of bringing Ubuntu on Windows 10.
Not much is known at this point since Microsoft’s trying to keep details secret, but don’t expect to be able to run Ubuntu directly on Windows 10. More likely, Microsoft’s working on integrating a container in Windows 10, as a Linux subsystem has already been spotted in preview builds of the operating system launched earlier this year.
Furthermore, it won’t be the kind of project that’s aimed at consumers, but more at developers, as Microsoft has been obsessed with devs lately. Ubuntu will most likely run on some native Windows libraries and will almost certainly come without the Unity interface, but will rely instead on Bash and a series of CLI tools, including make, gawk, and grep.
Official announcement coming later today
A recent BUILD 2016 session posted on Channel 9 and entitled “Running Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” (which has since been removed after everyone noticed it) also seems to indicate that a big announcement is coming at the developer conference.
While there are currently several ways to bring the Bash Linux shell on Windows, such as Cygwin and MSYS, there’s no doubt that Microsoft is aiming for better integration that would require zero work from developers who need such tools on Windows 10.
Certainly, more details will be provided in just a few hours, but it’s very clear that the software giant is up for some pretty big announcements this year. We’ll be live-blogging the event, so keep an eye on our news section for the latest disclosures from BUILD 2016.