Ubuntu on Windows?

Matthijs just told me that an Ubuntu distribution is shipped standard as part of Windows 10. If that’s the case, would there be a way to recommend that our Windows users for PyStan use Linux rather than Windows for installs and running Stan?

He says it’s as easy as opening the command line and typing bash. And the linux install instructions for PyStan work there.

I’m very worried about tens of thousands of new Windows/Python users from our Coursera course and am looking for ways to get around the install pain on Windows.

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See below for the instructions on how to install a Ubuntu subsystem under
Windows 10. I doubt it’s shipped with windows 10.

It should work, but many of the Windows Coursera users won’t use Windows 10 (at least not in 2018).

BTW, if you are using Ubuntu (whether via Windows 10 or otherwise), you can install Stan stuff from binaries by doing

sudo add-apt-repository -y "ppa:marutter/rrutter"
sudo add-apt-repository -y "ppa:marutter/c2d4u"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-cran-rstan r-cran-rstanarm

HT http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/12/22/#014_finding_binary_deb_packages

Yes it was included in the Windows 10 anniversary update last year, you just have to enable it after activating the developer mode (link). I’ve been using it for some time, it works really well!