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For some years now, Windows and Ubuntu have been coexisting to a degree, if you enable the Linux subsystem on windows and download the Ubuntu for Windows package from the Windows App store.
It makes it possible to muck about with Windows drivers and the Windows kernel from within a UNIX environment. Even make your own drivers that can send direct commands to the Windows kernel and even the TCP/IP stack. So long as you like the command line, there are some pretty cool tools and languages, such as C/C++, python, perl, and many of the other usual suspects at your disposal. It doesn’t really have support for Java, except as a runtime envirnonment. That shouldn’t stop you from installing JDK manually. You can install the one for Linux or the one for MS-Windows. Your choice. Also, there is no support at all for X-Windows.
The /mnt directory is used to house all of the drive letters that are visible to Windows. Here they are mounted as folders each named after their drive letter.
I can’t run MS-Windows commands like Notepad from the shell; but it turns out the Windows paths are not set by default in Ubuntu. Typing /mnt/c/Windows/notepad.exe allowed it to run. In fact, it can run any windows command, if you take the time to fix the $PATH variable. In addition, the Ubuntu subsystem doesn’t yet support the reading of ext3 filesystems, although it has no problem reading NTFS filesystems. An EXT3 driver I tried was able to identify and mount EXT3 filesystems (assigning it a drive letter) from within Windows, but no files were visible. I was offered to format the drive, but I declined. So, I wasn’t sure of the rationale for even having this driver if I can’t see any files.
Apart from that, it appears as if the main architect of the ext2 driver project, Matt Wu, has abandoned the project and has reduced his website to a blank webpage. I don’t see any updates on SourceForge later than 2015.