PM for Bash on Windows here. In answer to some of your questions:<p>&quot;Current beef is the BashOnWindows alpha. Why was this pushed out so early?&quot;<p>We released this feature early because we wanted to get it into the hands of the community in order to learn how they&#x27;d use it, what tools they&#x27;d run on it, how it would stand-up to real-world use, etc. And the community has been AWESOME, filing lots of bugs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashgithub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashgithub</a>) and engaging in an overwhelmingly positive and supportive manner. Thanks to all of you that have provided your feedback.<p>&quot;Quite literally nothing works on it.&quot;<p>This is just not accurate. There are a large number of things that do work surprisingly well on Bash&#x2F;WSL, even in this early stage in its development. While Scott and I were on Skype, prepping for &#x2F;&#x2F;Build, I curl&#x27;ed the Redis source tarball, unzipped it, apt-get install build-essential, built, and ran Redis, within minutes, without any modifications.<p>Are there many things that don&#x27;t work? Yes. Absolutely. We&#x27;ve been very, VERY transparent about this and, in fact, state explicitly in our intro video (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashav" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashav</a>) and our announcement (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashann" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;winbashann</a>) that there will be many gaps and that lots of things won&#x27;t work.<p>But let&#x27;s be fair here, we&#x27;re talking about an early beta feature in early builds of a beta OS that you choose to download for free. If you don&#x27;t know that you&#x27;re going to experience issues, you should not be running Insiders builds.<p>&quot;Ubuntu Trusty was a weird release to begin with&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s not.<p>That you don&#x27;t like it is merely a reality of the Linux ecosystem: Ask 100 Linux dev&#x27;s which distro to use and you&#x27;ll get perhaps 20 suggestions - Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, CentOs, RedHat, Suse, Gentoo, etc.<p>WSL is designed to be distro agnostic, but we had to start somewhere, so we chose a stable, supported distro&#x27;s that is very popular with developers - Ubuntu 14.04. We plan on supporting other distro as we expand and improve our implementation of WSL.<p>&quot;it&#x27;s very difficult to get modern versions of gcc, clang, python 3.5 or even ffmpeg&quot;<p>Really? You&#x27;re suggesting you don&#x27;t build everything from source??? ;)<p>Realistically, we&#x27;re aiming to benefit the most developers possible with this first release - there are far more developers using 14.04 right now than newer versions. And there&#x27;s FAR more existing code targetting 14.04 era toolsets than the latest and greatest.<p>We&#x27;ll get there, but you&#x27;ll have to be just a little patient while we improve the breadth and depth of WSL&#x27;s implementation.