Some Windows 10 versions have Windows Subsystem for Linux.   Once you enable this (if available on your version) you can choose from several linux distros.  You get a command-line environment (for GUI app's you use a Windows X11 server).  There is limited networking and disk IO is slower than bare metal.  If you are running small batch processing jobs it may be faster than rebooting.  The linux system lives in a special directory that contains a standard linux layout (/usr/bin, /home, etc) so you WSL home  is not the Windows %USERPROFILE% directory and therehave been warnings that you can encounter problems trying to manipulate the Windows filesystem from WSL.  There are also some limitations on things like stack size that only documented via blog posts.

In my past I have run workshops using linux software using VM's installed on the teaching lab's Windows boxes.   Once we got past the installation, these VM's were quite practical for small projects, but not at all suited to "real" tasks with large data sets.  I have tested a bunch of the same linux programs under WSL to see if it would be possible to avoid installing the VM and linux.  Most ran fine, some need tricks to increase stack size, and some won't run.  Most standard distro packages that don't do network I/O install and run well. 

In my experience, 4G B ram was just enough, using a basic linux window system on a Ubuntu 12.04.    I've noticed that recent distros have increased the minimum RAM requirement, so you have problems booting into a linux GUI.