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:
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
evilspoons - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Well, there was an extremely primitive registry in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (not Windows 3.1), so it's more like 23-24 years :|lmcd - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
While Windows 10 Mobile looks dead-ish, I wouldn't say for the reasons you guys have selected. The list of phones there consolidates the list of different cores Microsoft is supporting down to A7 (why this made the cut I don't know), A53, and Kryo. The former will probably be dropped soon, and Microsoft will go to exclusively ARMv8 powered devices. I wouldn't be surprised if support for ARMv8 devices lasts far longer than projected here. Microsoft is still investing hard in new ARM-based platforms, and devices within the same scope as those platforms will likely keep evolving.danjw - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Type: "Hopefully we will here some more news on this front soon." The "here" should be "hear".versesuvius - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
In a nutshell Win 10 is one big mess. Just about everything Microsoft is doing is fixing a problem or iterating on a solution to an unknown problem. The cost and time that needs to be put into installing and running and keeping a watch on what is happening to the computer that is running Win 10 is too prohibitive.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
The thing that bugs me in Creator's Update is the removal of the links to "Control Panel" and "Programs and Features" when you right click the start button. They've replaced them with links to the modern "Settings" and "Apps and Features", respectively. There are still to many settings that can't be adjusted in the modern apps, they're not ready to replace the legacy versions yet.On the other hand, they replaced "Command prompt" with "Power Shell" and Power Shell is absolutely ready to take over.
Samus - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
What I find interesting are the browser power consumption benchmarks.I don't agree with Microsoft.
Edge is undoubtedly more power efficient on my laptop for light browsing sessions, but Netflix is more efficient in Chrome. Also, for light browsing, I'd say Chrome is the least efficient. It's like a Honda Civic, no matter how hard you beat on it, it gets the same fuel economy; Chrome consistently uses about the same amount of power. It is occasionally bested by Firefox and almost always bested by Edge, except in Netflix where Edge seems to use more power.
These are my observations over the years I've been running Windows 10, and honestly the anniversary update didn't improve the Netflix performance for Chrome. My laptop is a Haswell Elitebook 810 G2.
Allan_Hundeboll - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Like a Civic you say? I have Civic and it will do 15 km/l when I drive with a light foot. If I drive like I stole it it will only do about 10 km/l...Zeratul56 - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
Why don't you use the Netflix app? It is pretty nice actually. I don't have my tablet in front of me but I am sure the memory footprint for the app is at least half compare to running in the browser.I am sure running Netflix in chrome has some hardware excelleration not found in other browsers. It would behoove Netflix to do that given the large user base of chrome.
I don't get why people don't jump on the app bandwagon in windows. I use the slack app over the browser as it uses much less resources. That seems to microsofts problem, they can't get people to break their old ways.
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
I have yet to download, install, or otherwise use a single UWP app. Everything is still basically win32.mikato - Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - link
So there is no update or successor to Windows Movie Maker in this Creators Update?