[Stubb]

Your Windows drives appear under /mnt/c, /mnt/d, etc. in WSL. So your Windows home directory is /mnt/c/Users/ffoobar.

You can easily read/write Windows files from Linux, but I don't think you can do the opposite. I've used git within WSL to drive a repo on my Windows drive.

WSL gives you full-blown Ubuntu 16.04 where you manage packages with apt-get. You have to look close to the bare metal to see differences. Until the creator's update, for example, ifconfig didn't work.

Earlier today, I compiled and ran some OpenMP-based code in WSL and it happily detected all the cores on my dev machine and kept them busy with worker threads. Pretty cool!

[steveklabnik]

Previously, if you read Linux files from Windows, it would brick the lxss entirely.

The bug report I filed suggested that this was being fixed soon.

[neves]

I thought it would give me total interoperability. That I could edit an movie in a windows app, run it through ffmepg, and go back to editing.

Cygwin is still useful.

[wvenable]

It does but you have to do that from the Windows file system not the Linux one. So from Linux you are accessing /mnt/c/Users/you/somedocument and from Windows it's C:\Users\you\somedocument.

[neves]

But isn't this a new thing? I believe you couldn't do it in the initial versions.

[wvenable]

No, it's always been that way from the initial release. It's literally the only file system interopt that exists.

You're not supposed to access the Linux filesystem from Windows -- it's in a system hidden area of your profile but some people still tried to mess with it with unfortunate consequences.