Cygwin implements a POSIX API on Win32 with a smattering of Nt* calls to improve compatibility but there's a lot of hoop jumping and hackery to get the right semantics. Fork isn't copy on write, for one thing.

I was a Cygwin user from about 1999 to 2022 or so, spent a little time on wsl2 (and it's what I still use on my laptop) but I'm fully Linux on the desktop since last year.

Cygwin is way older than CoLinux. CoLinux is from 2004. Cygwin was first released in 1995.

The problem with Cygwin as I remember it was DLL hell. You'd have applications (such as a OpenSSH port for Windows) which would include their own cygwin1.dll and then you'd have issues with different versions of said DLL.

Cygwin had less overhead which mattered in a world of limited RAM and heavy, limited swapping (x86-32, limited I/O, PATA, ...).

Those constraints also meant native applications instead of Web 2.0 NodeJS and what not. Java specifically had a bad name, and back then not even a coherent UI toolkit.

As always: two steps forward, one step back.

Developing on cygwin, however, was a right pain. If a C library you wanted to use didn't have a pre-built cygwin version (understandable!) then you end up doing 'configure, make' on everything in the dependency tree, and from memory about two thirds of the time you had to edit something because it's not quite POSIX enough sometimes.

"Windows subsystem" was an existing term of art on the NT architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#Architecture

Humans are weird and can loath and desire a thing at the same time; the success of Brutalism for example.

/off to fire up Windows95 on the Octane2 and get me some hot Linux action ..

Wait until you find IE was released for Unix, using some Win32 shims. And... die hard Unix sysadmin ran it under FVWM and compared to Netscape wasn't half bad. Both propietary, but sadly NScape didn't open Mozilla yet, and the rest of the alternatives such as Arena/Amaya coudn't compete with 'modern' CSS features and the like.

If you google there are many reasonable reasons for it. But the most straight forward is:

> Because we cannot name something leading with a trademark owned by someone else.

https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...

The core of the software is a subsystem, specifically a Windows subsystem; you're not running this subsystem on macOS or FreeBSD.

The "for Linux" is added because it's a subsystem for Linux applications (originally not leveraging a VM).

Microsoft also had the "Microsoft POSIX subsystem" (1993) and "Windows Services for UNIX" (1999) which were built on the "Subsystem for Unix-based Applications" (rather than "Unix-based Application Subsystem"). That chain of subsystems died at the end of Windows 8, though.

There are many reasons not to put "Linux" in front, but the naming is consistent with Microsoft's naming inconsistencies. It's not the first time they used "subsystem for" and it's not the first time they used "Windows x for y" either.

The naming is ambiguous, you could interpret the Windows subsystem for Linux as a subsystem of Linux (if it had such a thing) that runs Windows, or as a Windows subsystem for use with Linux. Swapping the order doesn't change that.

In other languages, the difference would be clearer.

Other people already answered but windows was just another personality on the original idea that cutler had for WNT. It just took a while for it to get implemented as a linux

It’s a sub-system of Windows that is used for Linux.

It can work either way though.

To reciprocate the naming of Wine, maybe it could have been named Line. Also, both have this positive clang, being associated with "having a good time".

I always have the same problem myself. Same as I had with version naming of old programs like "Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0" instead of the easier "Microsoft Word 2.0 for Windows".

I've been running colinux for years until early 2009 when I reinstalled my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP in a VM. So much faster.

(Windows 9x) (Subsystem for Linux)

Nowadays MSYS2, which does depend on cygwin under the hood, offers such a package manager (pacman of Arch Linux) and it is quite a user friendly to run native POSIX binaries on Windows without a linux VM.

Nope, the best way was VMWare Workstation, followed by Virtual Box.

Should have called it LINE.

The Showstoppers book by G. Pascal Zachary is an entertaining account of NT uprising.

On Windows NT building software from source under Interix[0] (nee OpenNT, later "Subsystem for Unix Applications") was pretty nice.

Interix was implemented as proper NT kernel "subsystem". It was just another build target for GNU automake, for example.

(Being that Interix was a real kernel subsystem I have this fever dream idea of a text-mode "distribution" of NT running w/o any Win32 subsystem.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

To me, it sounds like a subsystem that provides Windows Compability for the Linux host.

I do agree it's an issue of English being an imprecise language.

I thought WSL2 is functionally a virtual machine with deep host integration. That’s why you need HyperV.

w64devkit it's fine too; with just a few PATH settings and SDL2 libraries I could even compile UXN and some small SDl2 bound emulators.

https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

In my personal experience, Msys 2 would work great until it didn't. Unless this has changed, from what I remember, Msys2 compiled everything without PIC/PIE, and Windows does allow you to configure, system-wide, whether ASLR is used, and whether it's used "if supported" or always. If that setting is set to anything but off, Msys2 binaries will randomly crash with heap allocation errors, or they do on my system. It happened so much to me when I had actual coreutils installed that I switched to uutils-coreutils even though I knew that uutils-coreutils has some discrepancies/issues. Idk if they've fixed that bug or not; I did ask them once why they didn't just allow full ASLR and get on with things and they claimed that they needed to do non-ASLR compilations for docker.

It's a dominance thing. Classic abuser behaviour.

Meanwhile those that complained about Java, now ship a whole browser with their "native" application, and then complain about Google taking over the Web.

Windows' subsystem for Linux

Well it did take me 6 years to follow that up!

Just use ssh from Cygwin. DLL hell was rarely a problem, just always install everything via setup.exe.

The single biggest problem it has is slow forking. I learned to write my scripts in pure bash as much as possible, or as a composition of streaming executables, and avoid executing an executable per line of input or similar.

Old still running 24/7 industrial processing circuit with oddball bespoke addons based on DOS / early windows ??

Still got those in this part of the world sharing space with state of the art autonomous 100+ tonne robo trucks.

Tell us more!

Ha ha doing Unix like it was 1989. At the time I thought configure was the greatest of human achievements since I was distributing software amongst Sun machines of varying vintage and a Pyramid. I want to say good times but I prefer now ha ha

Sort of. Technically speaking, just enabling hyper-v turns your base windows install into a VM. Wsl2 then just runs along side

When backward compatibility used to mean something man!

Probably works for a bank.

Slow forking is only the second biggest problem IMO. The biggest is the lack of proper signals. There's a bunch of software out there that just isn't architected to work well without non-cooperative preemption.

autotools felt old even in 90's

Huh? Signals have worked fine for a long time under Cygwin.