Microsoft made headlines at last year’s Build developer conference when it announced that it would build support for the Bash shell and Ubuntu Linux binaries directly into Windows 10. Doing so enables developers to run command-line tools while building apps as well as allows power users to run limited instances of Linux directly on top of Windows without installing a virtual machine. For 2017’s Build conference in Seattle, Microsoft one-upped itself and announced that it is expanding Linux support to include OpenSuSE and Fedora distributions.
What’s really wild is that you’ll be able to pick up any of these three distros directly through the Windows Store. Users will first have to enter “Developer Mode” on their Windows 10 machine and enable Linux support. Then, rather than side load a virtual machine and Linux on top of that, users just have to head over to the Windows Store and download the distro with a single click.
The announcement comes as Microsoft increasingly courts a developer community that has traditionally worked in the Linux domain. The entire industry, in fact, has been slowly embracing open source platforms like Linux as a means of developing its online services. For its part, last Just the company released .Net core 1.0, a popular open-source software development platform, and ported it to Linux and OSX. Microsoft also released a preview of its SQL Server database for Linux around the same time.
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