Installing SQL Server on Windows still sucks, though with your CM tool of choice it's less painful (still takes a flipping century to install, however).

SQL Server 2016 on Windows 10 was fairly one click install when I did it a week or so ago. It was infinitely better than my experience with SQL Server 2012, which was a struggle at the best of times.

I had it installed and running in a couple of minutes. The wait is what I remember being the worst on Windows. apt was quick and painless though.

So I can install with apt-get in WSL on Windows instead of using the normal Windows installer? Full circle.

Funny, but I'm not sure it would actually work. Sockets are not fully supported on WSL - for example, you can't run an SSH server.

That's odd given how easy it is to shim the Linux/POSIX socket API - most of it anyway - on Windows. I made good money back in the day by writing server software that had to compile and run on both Windows and Linux (actually it was never deployed on Windows, but on an embedded Win32 compatible OS, but they were planning to move to Linux, so I did all development on Windows, tested on whatever embedded platform they used and Linux) - the "compatibility" layer was a few dozens of lines in a header file.

Just tell yourself it's apt install sybase.