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by trinix912
9 days ago
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They've already made a few attempts over the years (Windows Subsystem for UNIX comes to mind), neither really caught on, except WSL. I also don't quite get why one would want such a setup - why not just use MSYS2 or WSL? As it is, it's just a mishmash of CMD builtins, Windows utils, Powershell, and these Coreutils. Will one have to use CMD-style (%var%) variables or will it be the POSIX way ($var)? Also just keeping in mind when to use /s or -s style switches, which version gets invoked depending on the PATH, PS aliases, etc. is just a lot of mental overhead for seemingly little advantage over WSL. |
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Windows NT shipped with three personalities, OS/2, POSIX and Win32.
OS/2 was more of a compatibility thing than anything else, given the OS/2 history between IBM and Microsoft.
POSIX subsystem was half backed implementation, only enough to check some boxes in US government contracts, naturally it never took off. In fact, many people including myself, only never considered GNU/Linux, if Windows NT POSIX support was at the same level as any other UNIX, like it happens on mainframe and micros OS environments, e.g. PASE on z/OS.
Then as Windows actually started to take over UNIX workstations, with Win32 as main subsystem, there was MKS Toolkit as commercial product, Microsoft felt the complaints about the POSIX subsystem, then we had Interix acquisition, which evolved into Windows Services for UNIX, that you mention. Still not without quirks.
WSL took off, because given the experience on OS X, where devs buy Apple expecting GNU/Linux instead of POSIX, Microsoft took the right decision to offer GNU/Linux right from the start instead of yet another POSIX attempt.
By the time WSL came to be, it was already a standard practice to use Virtual Box or VMWare workstation instead of mingw/cygwin, so even better not having to install them.
Ironically I learnt UNIX on Xenix, when it was still sold by Microsoft, maybe they should have kept it.