For over a decade, the running joke in the Linux community was that whatever year you were in, that was the year of the Linux desktop. For even longer than that, Microsoft Windows has been the arch-nemesis of everything that Linux is and represents.
Yet somehow, someway karma has twisted fate such that now in 2016, Microsoft loves Linux so much that 2016 is now the year of Linux on Windows. To be precise, at the Microsoft Build conference this week, Microsoft and Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, announced what only a few years ago would have been labelled as an unholy alliance, enabling Ubuntu’s user space and bash shell to run natively inside of a Windows 10 Anniversary edition command console.