[pjmlp]

Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX assignments.

Instead I dual booted between both of them.

[EvanAnderson]

> Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX assignments.

Arguably they did have a serious POSIX subsystem w/ the Interix (nee OpenNT) acquisition but they didn't do anything with it. I remember building GNU software under Interix and having a blast with it.

I still wish there was a distribution of NT that booted text -mode and had an Interix-based userland. That would be tons of fun.

[pjmlp]

Nowadays that would be Windows Server Core with WSL, which unfortunely isn't yet supported.

[EvanAnderson]

Interix was so much more orthogonal to the design of NT-- so much more elegant. WSLv1 was more elegant than WSLv2. WSLv2 feels like a minor step up from just running a Linux VM.

[pjmlp]

Agreed, that is what happens when Linux syscalls are more relevant than regular UNIX.

See the usual complains about macOS not being Linux, from people that probably should be supporting Linux OEMs instead of buying Apple laptops.

[hylaride]

It's a shame. NT did support POSIX, but it was in practice designed to make it easier to port UNIX apps. At co-op job I had back in the day (~2000), I had to fight with Veritas' backup software on NT that wrote to tapes. I don't recall what it was (a device mapping to the drive maybe?), but you could see the UNIX foundations of the software.

[pjmlp]

Ironically they had multiple iterations of it, with POSIX subsystem in NT, MKS Toolkit, Interix, Windows Services for UNIX, for various levels of "POSIX support", dropped everything on Windows Vista, only to create WSL out from Project Astoria ashes.

And before they got golden goose with MS-DOS/IBM deal, they were into the UNIX business with Xenix.

A few reasons why Linux would probably never taken off, had Microsoft stayed closer to their UNIX related projects.

[hylaride]

I think Linux took off due to cost. If you're a startup or a web company with razor thin margins, you're not going to go Microsoft (or Sun).

Same story with MySQL.

[temac]

There was actually "SUA" after "SFU", only removed in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

[banish-m4]

It was mostly for running NFS to talk to other UNIX boxes, not to run UNIX software.

To make a Windows NT box UNIX-ish, there was MKS Toolkit. It predates Cygwin, msys, and djgpp.

[progmetaldev]

Absolutely, I had a university instructor that taught us both Windows NT and (I believe) Red Hat Linux in 1998, for running web servers. Linux made much more sense when thinking about a multi-user system running various services. I ended up dual booting Windows and Slackware to learn Linux, while also being able to use the software I was already familiar with on Windows. If Microsoft had gone deeply into POSIX for their consumer systems, I don't believe I would have switched over to Linux except for quality of life improvements that may have come about (which may have never happened).