Ubuntu in Windows Store - Significance for end users?

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Microsoft has announced that Ubuntu is now available for download from the Windows Store for Insiders with SUSE and Fedora following soon.

There’s a lot of talk of what this means for developers but what does it signify for end users, especially casual users like me? Will I be able to run darktable from within Windows instead of creating a dual boot machine? I thought that would require a VM? Or is this only for developers?

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I think, this is just for some command line programs. So no DT :slightly_frowning_face:.

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Actually, I (and others) have gotten darktable to run after installing a few things. However, this is not a good idea and is absolutely unsupported. Better to ask the devs politely if they’ve made any headway for a win client that they might like some help with.

(Or jump ship to a distro of your choice… :wink: ).

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The article linked by @Raja indicates:

I also announced that we were also working with SUSE and Fedora to bring their Linux distro’s to the Windows Store. Both SUSE and Fedora are nearing completion and will arrive in the store over the next week or two.

has some ominous wording in it (although probably only ominous because of its vagueness):

Q2) Should I continue to run the current/legacy distro or move to the new Store distros
A2) You can continue to run the current/legacy distro, but we do encourage you to move to using the store distro’s as your primary distro’s, because the current/legacy distro will be deprecated at some point.

They are not clear on what will be deprecated. It’s probably the current bash on Windows stuff, but they don’t say.
Edit: I got confirmation from Microsoft that what will be deprecated is the current Bash on Windows support.

Here is Ubuntu’s announcement:

and some more background:

As @patdavid says, why not just jump ship to a good Linux distro? :slight_smile:

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I can’t imagine that the color management works well running DT from WSL.

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No need to. Peter Budai has been extremely helpful in the past months to help us iron out almost all Windows specific bugs (that we know of) and we are confident that native Windows support will be available in darktable 2.4 – which we hope to release earlier than Christmas this time. But no promises whatsoever on the latter. :smile:

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If command line programs will work it is better than nothing. I had a lot of trouble finding tools to convert Magic Lanter Dual ISO files to DNG for Windows (I tried several that refused to run). This could help get around that.

I’ve been thinking of it for a while and even have Mint on a Live USB (and Ubuntu before that on a bootable DVD) but the (I suppose familiar) list of excuses are

  • I need to be familiar with Windows for work
  • I might be willing to shift to Linux but my mom and sis will not, and as long as I have to be their tech support I better be familiar with Windows
  • At least one of the bits on my PC does not have Linux drivers and it is an important bit
  • This is my only PC and if I get the transition/metamorphosis wrong I have no one to turn to help with getting it unstuck
  • Etc., etc.
    It’s on the list though, under the ‘someday’ category. Ubuntu in the Windows Store sounded like a good way to stop into the shallow end of the pool.
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Try BarracudaGUI or Lightroom Dual ISO Plugin. Both have worked for me in the past. They are GUI front-ends to cr2hdr or cr2hdr.exe with additional features.