Microsoft, Corp. and Canonical Ltd have announced a new partnership that will see the Ubuntu Linux command-line tool Bash come to Windows 10.

The new support comes not via running a virtual machine or emulator (which has been possible previously), but through native Ubuntu Linux binaries being baked directly into Windows 10 using the technology Microsoft developed with its now abandoned Project Astoria, an attempt to emulate Android apps on Windows Phone.

“This isn’t Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM,” Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman explained in a blog post. “This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself.”

“It’s fast and lightweight and it’s the real binaries. This is a genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It’s fast and it’s lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you – using apt-get – just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on.”

Developers are said to be able to write .sh Bash scripts in Windows, and use emacs to edit code.

Once installed, the new functionality will allow users to type “bash” (enter) from the Windows Start menu to open a cmd.exe console running Ubuntu’s/bin/bash. According to Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland, this delivers full access to all of the Ubuntu user space including  apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch, and most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives.

Why?

Kirkland explained the partnership from their side, explaining that it was a way to bridge the world of free and open source technology:

 Having dedicated most of the past two decades of my career to free and open source software, this is an almost surreal endorsement by Microsoft on the importance of open source to developers.  Indeed, what a fantastic opportunity to bridge the world of free and open source technology directly into any Windows 10 desktop on the planet.  And what a wonderful vector into learning and using more Ubuntu and Linux in public clouds like Azure.  From Microsoft’s perspective, a variety of surveys and user studies have pointed to bash and Linux tools — very specifically, Ubuntu — be available in Windows, and without resource-heavy full virtualization.

It’s certainly an unexpected move from Microsoft and despite years of trying to build their own alternative services may finally be a case of the company listening to what actual developers want.

The new support for Ubuntu will be available in the Windows 10 Anniversary update to be made available in the Northern summer.

Image credit: Canonical.