Microsoft to offer 3 flavors of Linux in the Windows Store

PanARMENIAN.Net - Microsoft made headlines at last year's Build developer conference when it announced that it would build support for the Bash shell and Ubuntu Linux binaries directly into Windows 10. Doing so enables devs to run command-line tools while building apps as well as allows power users to run limited instances of Linux directly on top of Windows without installing a virtual machine. At this year's conference, the company one-upped itself and announced that it's expanding Linux support to include OpenSUSE and Fedora distributions, according to Engadget.

What's really wild is that you'll be able to pick up any of these three distributions directly through the Windows Store. Users will first have to enter Developer Mode on their Windows 10 machine and enable Linux support. Then, rather than sideload a virtual machine and Linux on top of that, users just have to head over to the Windows Store and download the distro with a single click, Engadget said.

The announcement comes as Microsoft increasingly courts a developer community that has traditionally worked in the Linux domain. The entire industry, in fact, has been slowly embracing open-source platforms like Linux as a means of developing its online services. For its part, the company just released. Net core 1.0, a popular open-source software-development platform, and ported it to Linux and OSX. Microsoft also released a preview of its SQL Server database for Linux around the same time.