What's really wild is that you'll be able to pick up any of these three distributions 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 sideload 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, the company just 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.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from Microsoft Build 2017.