March 30th, 2016

Ubuntu Coming to Windows 10

In its quest to become the Microsoft of the Linux world, Ubuntu and Microsoft are expected to announce today that Ubuntu will soon run on Windows 10.

Holy crap!

In Friday’s Week in Review I jokingly opined that I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Ubuntu for Windows” as a move by the folks at Canonical as part of their plans for world domination. Guess what? It’s really happening.

In an article published Tuesday, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that “[a]ccording to sources at Canonical” a deal has been worked out between Ubuntu’s parent company and Microsoft that will lead to the GNU/Linux distro being able to run alongside Windows 10. According to Vaughan-Nichols, “This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.”

Details of this new partnership are expected to be announced this morning at the Microsoft Build developer conference in San Francisco. It’s expected that the Windows implementation of the Linux distro won’t be the full operating system complete with the Unity desktop, but more of a developers toolkit version allowing access to such as Bash, make, gawk and grep.

Just as no crystal ball was needed to predict such a project and partnership coming from the folks on the Isle of Man, no fortune telling devices are needed to predict what the response will be from the free tech communities — almost unanimously they’ll be against it and will see this as proof that Canonical, which already has something of a tarnished reputation in FOSS circles, has little to no commitment to free and open source.

What will be more interesting will be to see the verbal fights which are sure to break out among dyed-in-the-wool Ubuntu users and supporters on social sites such as Reddit. I’m assuming we’ll see most Ubuntu fans supporting and defending this move, with other longtime Ubuntu users in opposition. We can also expect to see some longtime Ubuntu users announcing that they’ll be ditching Ubuntu for another distribution.

This is indeed a day to grab the popcorn. With the news that SCO is back and planning to appeal the dismissal of its case against IBM, this latest news makes today something of an all day double feature picture show.

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