[flomo]

And WSL could potentially be a much better experience than OS X's "real Unix" with Homebrew and etc.

The paths and base configuration will match your production environment, no worries about version mismatches or missing extensions. Ubuntu packages generally come with a sane and ready-to-run configuration, with service scripts and the like. (I use pkgsrc which seems more polished than Homebrew, but the installing experience is still not as nice as Ubuntu. Maybe someone will make a "Linux subsystem for Mac"...)

If anything this helps Linux because it cements popular Linux distros as the default *nix environments.

[sbarre]

I think "Linux subsystem for Mac" is stuff like Vagrant, where you can still work on your dev projects locally/natively but they're shared into a Linux environment that can be set up to mimic your production environments..

This can be done today on Windows too of course, even without this new fancy thing.

[flomo]

Sure, the serious use case is a VM or Docker or etcetera-virtual based solution. However I must have a couple dozen maintenance-mode projects on my system and there's a certain appeal to alt-tabbing from MS Excel or Photoshop to a console window and typing `service start foo` (or the launchd equivalent).

There are still a gazillion people using WAMP (and so on) as a bad impersonation of their production environment, so this fills a role.