Windows 10 developers have been gifted yet another way of running Linux on their desktop in the form of Canonical’s Multipass.
Users of Microsoft’s OS have been spoiled for choice as the software maker has sought to persuade developers that these days it prefers to snuggle up to rather than stomp on penguin-based life.
Windows 10 Hyper-V has allowed developers to spin up Linux Virtual Machines with little effort, and last September Canonical became a fully paid-up member of the Hyper-V club, with an Enhanced Session Mode-enabled (ESM) version of Ubuntu allowing clipboard and file sharing between Ubuntu’s desktop and Windows.
A GUI is all well and good, but the command line is where the magic happens and, again, Microsoft has an answer in Windows 10 in the form of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Fire up WSL for your distro of choice and hey presto! Here’s Bash, ready to play.
However, WSL has some hulking limitations of its own, being more a compatibility layer and lacking a Linux Kernel.
Enter Multipass, which today made its way out of private beta.
Multipass, at its core, is a service to manage Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) virtual machines in Windows 10 without the overhead of faffing about with Hyper-V (although Hyper-V is most definitely required to make the thing work).
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/22/multipass/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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