More details tomorrow, but likely this will be geared for IT pros rather than general users. I'm curious to see what they do with it. Virtual machines have plenty to recommend them, but integrated access means no separate allocations of your hardware, less OS management, less wait from when you decide to do something linuxy to when it's up and running, and no need to even decide how to move info from VM linux to windows or vice versa. It's all in one spot.

I also think this may be an early herald for how Nadella's MS will be different from Ballmer's. Ballmer's MS was worried that even a functional Office on Windows Mobile would threaten desktop Office. It was a company wound up in knots trying to keep threats at bay. Lately MS seems more like a company moving forward rather than one obsessed with protecting past accomplishments.

I never thought I would see the day that MS would even consider integrating an Linux based system like Ubuntu into Windows, I sure would like to know the reasoning behind their decision?

My understanding is that it's motivated by cloud developers who work with servers based mostly in linux. Rather than having to juggle back and forth between windows and linux, this allows them work entirely in windows with less time spent juggling data back and forth between VMs, multiboots or entirely distinct hardware. It's basically a streamlining option. And a smart one for MS, though I wouldn't agree that it's because they think Linux is the future. More that they want to keep as many people in the windows ecosphere for as long as possible to keep linux from opening ever more fronts against windows.

I'm still in a tinkering phase with Linux myself, so I'm still trying to feel through how this will work for more casual users hoping to run linux software from within windows, but I wouldn't be surprised if developers build on top of this to make a lot of things more streamlined even for normal users. Right now it's easy enough to run Android apps in windows through some sort of emulator, but imagine if you didn't need an emulator?

Oh, ok 😛 No performance boosts, got it :P

for newer hardware there is no real benefit except for it being free. for older hardware it can give them a second life by allowing them to use modern applications to browse the web safely and efficiently.that being said i used that on my old dual core laptop