Apparently, the Linux bash shell is coming to Windows 10. This will offer a fully functional Linux bash prompt in the Windows app store, a good alternative to Powershell. This is in partnership with Canonical who work on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. As long as this offers tools such as dig, wget, and whois, it will be a very powerful tool for Windows system administration. A good thing to partner with Powershell, which has commands to start and stop Windows services and install features for Windows. This was announced at the Build Developer Conference. The Linux bash shell has been in Linux for a very long time, since 1989. It has extensive support for scripting and therefore is used in the Linux installation to automate many tasks. If this could be used in Windows 10 to script various administration tasks, it would be a good tool for any systems admin who is skilled in the Linux shell. Microsoft are embracing open-source software in a big way, I hope this is not an attempt to extinguish the competition, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Server and Ubuntu server products.
Microsoft even have a Github account with quite a few open-source programs they have released, a huge list indeed. This is what they need to compete in the modern world, a lot of modern server tasks such as web hosting, file servers, printer servers and workgroups can be done on Linux with Apache and SAMBA. So Microsoft must adapt to compete with Linux and UNIX. If only they could improve the code-base of Windows, apparently, it is a huge mess in Windows 10. Pushing a massive code-base like Windows 10 with all sorts of code embedded together in the one operating system. If they could start a parallel project to start a whole new Windows operating system that would use a whole new code-base, that would be a very good project, but this would be very costly. I would love to see Microsoft take a risk and develop an entire Windows operating system from scratch. Redmond seem to be focused on the bottom line, getting the new Windows release out there, without worrying about whether it will work on all modern machines. Windows 10 does have Directx 12 coming, which will be used by the new Arma 3 Apex update, but I will stick with Windows 7 for a good while.
Windows 7 is still supported until 2020. This is still a few years away yet. And it is still getting updates. This is just like the Linux prompt you could install in Windows Server 2008 and 2003. This offered a csh shell that could run many Linux commands on a Windows Server PC. Microsoft Services for UNIX allowed this functionality.