Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop.
>Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls.
It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
...and that bites you in a surprising number of ways.
I recently tried porting some software that runs just fine under Ubuntu-on-x86 to Ubuntu-on-WSL, and I found three different failure modes in the console/pty mechanism before I gave up. I then tried running it under Cygwin and it ran correctly out of the box.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to try to run a program like GNU screen under WSL, but the core problem isn’t any specific application. Any program that does anything even moderately tricky with ptys is likely to fail under WSL.
Does that mean Ctrl-C is still "copy" on Windows even in a bash shell?