The Windows 10 Creators Update Arrives
by Brett Howse on April 25, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Windows Subsystem for Linux
When Microsoft announced they were adding Bash support to Windows, they picked the right place to do it. It was announced at their Build developer conference last year, and it got a lot of applause. It was arguably one of the biggest additions to the Anniversary Update, and it wasn’t just the Bash shell either. Bash runs on Ubuntu which is running as a subsystem of Windows, allowing many Linux commands to work out of the box with no virtual machine necessary.
In the time since this was released last summer, Microsoft has been hard at work adding more features here. One of the biggest changes is they have moved from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04. It must be noted that it is not automatically updated, but will have the new version for new installs. You can try to upgrade it in-place, but the recommended method is to remove the WSL and re-add it.
Bash in the Powershell console
They have also added more support for developer tools (source):
- Core tools: apt, sed, grep, awk, top, tmux, ssh, scp, etc.
- Shells: Bash, zsh, fish, etc.
- Dev tools: vim, emacs, nano, git, gdb, etc.
- Languages & platforms: Node.js & npm, Ruby & Gems, Java & Maven, Python & Pip, C/C++, C# & .NET Core & Nuget, Go, Rust, Haskell, Elixir/Erlang, etc.
- Systems & Services: sshd, Apache, lighttpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL
- And many others
INOTIFY
They have also added support for mapped network drives, mounting Windows drives, and quite a bit more. There is now support for file change notification support, network connection enumeration, and more. The amount of new features in the Linux Subsystem is fairly impressive, and Microsoft’s other departments could learn from these devs, who keep a detailed change log of everything they have added, and you can find it here:
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Ubercake - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
When it comes to hardware of any kind coming out of Microsoft, count on Microsoft to stop producing and supporting (or in other words "giving up") on it within a couple of years. This Surface Studio is a fantastic idea. The Microsoft Band was a great idea/product. Now no longer supported/produced. The Surface RT was a great idea that wasn't supported after its 3rd year. Mainstream phone apps are still not there. Zune music player (sort of competing with iPod) was gone soon after it was started.The universal windows platform or whatever it won't be called because the hardware just won't be their to support the idea in a few years. Nothing portable device outside of the Surface Pro (all 10 of you Surface Pro users know what I'm talking about!) will be around using the Windows OS in a few years. Why is Microsoft focusing at all on a universal platform that isn't Android- or iOS-based when you know no Microsoft hardware is supported for more than a couple of years? So they can quit it in a couple of years like everything else?
xthetenth - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
The reason the Surface 3 is gone without a successor is because the niche for a lower cost 2 in 1 is an ecosystem now, not a single product.Flunk - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Intel also pulled the plug on the line of Atom chips the Surface 3 used, leaving Microsoft high and dry. It's possible they'll come up with a new non-pro Surface that uses ARM chips, but that didn't sell all the great the first time.gerz1219 - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
They seem to have a foothold with the Surface Pro, so I wouldn't expect them to kill that any time soon. The problem with Microsoft's hardware ventures is that many of them simply haven't sold very well. They kind of had to give up on the Zune when they had warehouses full of unsold units and it was clear that nobody wanted an alternative to the iPod. Same for Surface RT and the Windows phones.I think any Microsoft device that kind of overlaps with traditional desktops will be well supported in the future. It's their attempts to branch out into mobile that have routinely failed and been abandoned.
Holliday75 - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
I have a Surface Pro. Who are the other 9 users? We should start a club!SaolDan - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
SP4 FTW.Instyle - Thursday, April 27, 2017 - link
The Surface Studio is currently available so I have no idea what you're talking about there. The Surface Pro and Xbox lines have sold in the millions, have plenty of active users and are currently supported. The Zune was supported for quite a long time as well. I think you need to go do some research. The main failed products were Windows Mobile, Surface RT and Microsoft Band.DanNeely - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
"Hopefully we’ll have a chance to dig into this a bit more in the future."Some things in game mode I'd be interested in seeing tested (and might try myself in a few weeks or month when I install the update) are if it helps distributed computing play any nicer with not just games but foreground apps in general. I run several BOINC projects with my spare CPU/GPU cycles. For the most part it just works on the desktop and with simpler games. Games that are GPU heavy or use multiple heavy threads are a problem though because the OS doesn't give enough GPU to keep frame rates up and effectively only lets the game have a single CPU core. Boinc's mitigation options are rather limited; basically I can set it so that when certain apps are running (by executable path) Boinc entirely stops CPU and/or GPU apps. It's all or nothing though (meaning I can't let it leave 4 cores free for my game and continue to do science on the other 4).
More recently I've ran into occasional problems with HTML5 video playback while a GPU apps are running. Years ago I had similar problems with the general desktop and some GPU apps, but that was a much more consistent case. This is far more intermittent and I haven't been able to nail down any sort of pattern yet. May try gaming my browser to see what happens.
dgingeri - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Why am I so much less enthused about this update than I was about the last big one? It just doesn't seem to have anything I'm interested in.kwall8 - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
The best addition is an address bar in regedit. Only took them 20 years :D