Well for now their top priority is to make a binary compatible way to run pre-existing (parts of) Linux distro, and it works quite well for beta software (I wou

Well for now their top priority is to make a binary compatible way to run pre-existing (parts of) Linux distro, and it works quite well for beta software (I would not have said the same if it was released software in the same state, but they seem to very actively be working on it and fixing bugs, and progress is shown between builds) Some technical console details are far from perfect IMO, but already good enough for common scenarios and given the context they are in its quite impressive (even if shortcuts are taken in regard with Windows interop) What will come after will largely depend upon the reception on the first release, I guess. Loads of people already want to at least be able to spawn Windows processes from the WSL env, but that's quite understandable and present no serious risk of extinguishing the GNU/Linux ecosystem by some kind of miracle. I would not see any point of MS going further; they have their own complete ecosystem which in some aspect is technically far more advanced and/or has far more potential than competing solutions (UWP is all about convergence and unless they reboot once again, which I think they have no reason to do anymore, they will eventually get it right on mobile, now maybe from a time to market point of view this will be too late but I highly doubt that the android subsystem will be resuscitated so I don't see what WSL could bring to that story anyway), most people are not even going to want to run WSL in production for server workloads (and would have not wanted to even if MS told them it's OK, which they did not). The dev target is a very good choice and the approach solve 90% of the issues previous attempts (Posix subsys, SUA) had (not used enough, separate target with small ecosystem, eventually buggy because of that), and for some other applications Cygwin is already available right now and good enough for what it does and how it does it. The Posix subsys had actually been instrumental for MS to a wide take over of US public markets in an impressive bad faith stunt (and that actually was the only reason for its very presence), but the situation is radically different now and the expectation have moved to higher layers, so if they manage to use it like that again I think it will only be in anecdotal proportions.