[dbdoskey]

If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.

[pjmlp]

I can tell that if POSIX subsystem in Windows NT was actually a good enough UNIX experience, I would never bothered with those Slackware 2.0 install disks.

And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.

[dfox]

The original POSIX subsystem was just there so MS could say that it exists (and pass DoD requirements).

It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).

[pjmlp]

Indeed, and that is why if I wanted to do university work at home instead of fighting for a place at one DG/UX terminal at the campus, I had to find something else.

I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.

First impressions matter most.

[mmx1]

Realistically anyone who cared would be using something like Cygwin (and the original UNIX server market segment evaporated due to Linux and had zero interest in migrating to NT in that form--some did migrate due to application layer benefits like .NET but not for the same workloads.)

[pjmlp]

There is an alternative universe where Windows NT POSIX is really as it should have been in first place, and Linux never takes off as there is no need for it.

As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.

[mmx1]

Obviously we'll never know, but I seriously doubt that parallel universe would've had a chance to materialize. Not the least due to "free as in beer" aspect of Linux whilst web/Apache was growing at the pace it did. All proprietary unices are basically dead. Sun was likely the sole company that had the best attitude to live alongside open source, but they also proved it wasn't a good enough business post bubble burst. NT and Darwin remain alive due to their desktop use, not server.

[tjoff]

WSL 1 works fine. I much prefer it over 2 because I only run windows in a VM and nested virtualization support isn't all there.

Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.

[f1shy]

That would not be unique, as is what BSD has done for Linux compatibility basically forever.

[TeMPOraL]

BSD and Linux are in the same bucket, so that doesn't count, not any more than MacOS compatibility with Linux. Windows is the odd one out.

[mmx1]

I don't think it is fair to brush it off under "same bucket; doesn't count." The syscalls are still different and there's quite a bit of nuance. I mean the lines you're drawing are out of superficial convenience and quite arbitrary. In fact, I'd argue macOS/Darwin/XNU are really Mach at their core (virtual memory subsystem, process management and IPC) and BSD syscalls are simply an emulated service on Mach, which is quite different from traditional UNIX. The fact that as a user you think of macOS much more similar to Linux is not really reflective of what happens under the hood. Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.

[TeMPOraL]

> Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.

I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.

[pjmlp]

Solaris did as well.