Hyper-V is just a VM environment that comes with some versions of windows... It's not really too much different than VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox... It does have an option to start in the background on machine start on the desktop version.
So I installed Ubuntu Server (latest) in a Virtual Machine via Hyper-V... set it to auto-boot.. setup OpenSSH, setup Samba ... I kind of just muddled through it, to be honest.. after that, I setup Docker, build-essentials and nvm, which covered my needs there.
On the windows side, I use Clover as an explorer replacement (file explorer, not the desktop), and use ConEmu for tabbed shell interfaces. It works pretty well for me. I use GUI stuff in windows, and the linux side via SSH.
