flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded.
Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was merely a lightweight DLL to link to (or a bunch of them), it also kept the cruft low without messing with ring 0.
However, it lacked the convenience of a CLI package manager back then, and I remember being hooked on CoLinux when I had to work on Windows.
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.
Meanwhile those that complained about Java, now ship a whole browser with their "native" application, and then complain about Google taking over the Web.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Requiring every single Linux app developer to recompile their app using Cygwin and account for quirks that it may have is not the correct approach. Having Microsoft handle all of the compatibility concerns scales much better.
So, is it like colinux[0], but for pre-NT windows? Neat!
Back when I was still using windows (probably XP era), I used to run colinux, it was kind of amazing, setting up something like LAMP stack on the linux side was a lot easier and then using windows editors for editing made for quite nice local dev env, I think! Could even try some of the X11 servers on windows and use a linux desktop on top of windows.
When I noticed I kept inching towards more and more unixy enviornment on the windows, I eventually switched to macOS.
Apart from the obvious hack-value, I can't quite imagine even pretend use-case, with some 486 era machine, you would be limited by memory quite quickly!
By Microsoft’s convention, that would be a way to run Windows 9x on Linux. It’s a bit confusing. Another example is “Windows Subsystem for Android”, which is what they use for running Android apps on Windows. I think the idea is that it’s not a “Windows Subsystem” for X, but rather a Windows “Subsystem for X”.
Which is exactly what the post says this is. It's running Windows 9x on Linux kernel. It's strangely worded, but from the follow up comment, and the readme in the repo it seems clear that it's running on the Linux kernel.
The tinkerer side of me wants to see a version of this for Windows XP but even then I struggle to find a use case for it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Opportunity cost. Bah humbug.
Hmm I wonder how stable it is.. It cannot render correctly Window control buttons (Minimize, Maximize, Close). If it fails on such basic task, I wonder where it crashes...
If I can get this to work (haven't tried yet) it directly solves a problem I have right now this week right here in 2026, 30 years after Windows 95 was even a thing.
Yes, I have weird problems. I get to look after some very weird shit.
If you're dealing with weird legacy 9x systems in 2026, another headache you've probably run into is getting them to talk to the modern web (since modern TLS and JS completely break old browsers).
I actually built a win9x compatibility mode into BrowserBox specifically for this kind of weirdness. You run the server on a modern system and launch it with bbx win9x-run, and it proxies the modern web to legacy clients. It works surprisingly well with IE5, IE6, and old Netscape on Windows 95/98/NT. Might be a fun addition to your retro utility belt!
Little late but would this have actually allowed running early Linux under Windows when Windows 95 came out in the 90s? I remember only dual booting being available at that time.
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.
Speaking of vintage IE and Netscape on old Win, it's actually still possible to use them to browse the modern web if you proxy it.
I built a Win9x compatibility mode for BrowserBox that does exactly this (https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/blob/main/readme-fi...). Ur modern server does all the rendering, and it outputs a client link specifically designed for legacy browsers like IE5, IE6, and Netscape running on Windows 95/98/NT, streaming them the pixels. It's definitely an abomination, but there's something magical and retro that I like about viewing the 2026 internet through an IE6 window ;) ;p xx
- Retrozilla with some about:config flags disabling old SSL cyphers and new keys to enable
newer ones
- Iron TCL maybe with KernelEx and BFGXP from https://luxferre.top reading gopher and gemini sites
such as gemini://gemi.dev proxying all the web bloat and slimming it down like crazy
Everytime I see something like this, I'm like, how in the hell did they learn and then figure this out? Congrats on this!!!! I will definitely have to play with this for some of that sweet nostalga.
lol, if you do assemble that Pentium desktop, one of the first things you'll notice is that the modern web is completely unusable on it natively.
To get around that, I recently added a legacy compatibility mode to BrowserBox (bbx win9x-run). It basically lets you run the server on your modern daily driver, and access it via IE 5, IE 6, or Netscape on the Pentium box. It strips away the modern TLS/JS rendering issues and lets you actually browse the modern web from Windows 9x. Highly recommend giving it a spin if you get that machine built!
Oddly enough, I could kind of use this right now. I have some software which used SCSI (Adaptec WNASPI32.dll) calls to administer a device over the SCSI bus .. would this Subsystem be usable for that, or does it still require I build a WNASP32.dll shim to do translation?
So, you have Windows software. This "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux" just boots Windows 95. I don't know what you would use the Linux part for. Care to explain more what you want to do?
If you want to run your windows software in Linux, you could try Wine. Wine seems to have support for WNASPI so it's possible your software would just work. (You might have to run Wine as root I guess, to get access to the SCSI devices.)
If Wine doesn't work, Windows in QEMU with PCI passthrough to the SCSI controller might have better chances to work.
I need raw SCSI I/O to be virtualizable in the linux context, so I could run a Windows app (yes it already works in Wine), and have it 'see' a SCSI device as if it were real hardware.
Wines WNASPI32.dll is really just a facade - it doesn't provide actual SCSI services, its just there for SCSI-using apps to think they have ASPI onboard - so for my case I would need to write a shim to pass through SCSI IO requests to a Linux service - or loopback file? - to actually process the requests. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but if there is some way I can set up a loopback file under Linux to 'pretend' to be a SCSI block device for a Windows app, I'd sure like to know if its possible ..
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".
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.
No natural language is inherently imprecise. Every language has its own system to resolve vagueness or ambiguity and elaborate on the supposedly "missing" features of the language. This issue is relatively settled in linguistics.
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".
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
Is this person a wizard?
To me, this seems an impossible feat.
But I wonder how it seems to people who understand how it works?
I'm reminded of this joke:
Two mathematicians are talking. One says a theorem is trivial. After two hours of explanation, the other agrees that it is indeed trivial.
Before WSL, the best ways to run unmodified Linux binaries inside Windows were CoLinux and flinux.
http://www.colinux.org/
https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux
flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded.
Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was merely a lightweight DLL to link to (or a bunch of them), it also kept the cruft low without messing with ring 0.
However, it lacked the convenience of a CLI package manager back then, and I remember being hooked on CoLinux when I had to work on Windows.
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.
Meanwhile those that complained about Java, now ship a whole browser with their "native" application, and then complain about Google taking over the Web.
I think those are two solidly different camps of people
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.
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.
Huh? Signals have worked fine for a long time under Cygwin.
> Cygwin had less overhead which mattered in a world of limited RAM and heavy, limited swapping (x86-32, limited I/O, PATA, ...).
Maybe so, but my memory of Cygwin was waiting multiple seconds just for the Cygwin CLI prompt to load. It was very slow on my machines.
> Java specifically had a bad name, and back then not even a coherent UI toolkit.
Java was ahead of its time, now nothing has a coherent UI toolkit.
Nope, the best way was VMWare Workstation, followed by Virtual Box.
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.
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.
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.
MSYS2 is my favorite in this area. Super lightweight and easy to use, highly recommend.
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.
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
autotools felt old even in 90's
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
I thought WSL2 is functionally a virtual machine with deep host integration. That’s why you need HyperV.
Sort of. Technically speaking, just enabling hyper-v turns your base windows install into a VM. Wsl2 then just runs along side
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.
>Cygwin was technically the correct approach
Requiring every single Linux app developer to recompile their app using Cygwin and account for quirks that it may have is not the correct approach. Having Microsoft handle all of the compatibility concerns scales much better.
So, is it like colinux[0], but for pre-NT windows? Neat!
Back when I was still using windows (probably XP era), I used to run colinux, it was kind of amazing, setting up something like LAMP stack on the linux side was a lot easier and then using windows editors for editing made for quite nice local dev env, I think! Could even try some of the X11 servers on windows and use a linux desktop on top of windows.
When I noticed I kept inching towards more and more unixy enviornment on the windows, I eventually switched to macOS.
Apart from the obvious hack-value, I can't quite imagine even pretend use-case, with some 486 era machine, you would be limited by memory quite quickly!
[0] http://colinux.org/
Colinux was a tech feat, just not that many people noticed.
By microsoft's naming scheme this should be Linux Subsystem for Windows
Yeah this has never made sense...
Especially since the other subsystems were referred to as the OS/2 subsystem, Posix subsystem, Win32 subsystem, Security subsystem, etc
It makes tons of sense if you understand marketing and that the brand "Windows" must always come first.
Does that explain Word for Windows?
No? WSL is Linux on Windows — so W9xSL is Linux on Windows 9x. I think… :)
WSL is "Windows Subsystem for Linux", so this should be "Linux Subsystem for Windows 9x"
By Microsoft’s convention, that would be a way to run Windows 9x on Linux. It’s a bit confusing. Another example is “Windows Subsystem for Android”, which is what they use for running Android apps on Windows. I think the idea is that it’s not a “Windows Subsystem” for X, but rather a Windows “Subsystem for X”.
(Edited: mixed it up on the last sentence.)
Yeah it makes more sense if you consider the word Windows' to be in possessive form.
> that would be a way to run Windows 9x on Linux
Which is exactly what the post says this is. It's running Windows 9x on Linux kernel. It's strangely worded, but from the follow up comment, and the readme in the repo it seems clear that it's running on the Linux kernel.
> Proudly written with zero AI.
Unfortunately this is ambiguous, as there's an AI product called Zero AI.
> Proudly written without AI.
Looks like it's been updated now to be more clear. Amazing though.
I guess easier than https://github.com/haileys/doslinux
Well it did take me 6 years to follow that up!
Modern linux kernel running cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, sick!
> "no hardware virtualisation"
> looks inside
> virtual 8086 mode
that’s virtualization, not virtualisation
This is cool. But... why????
The tinkerer side of me wants to see a version of this for Windows XP but even then I struggle to find a use case for it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Opportunity cost. Bah humbug.
Hmm I wonder how stable it is.. It cannot render correctly Window control buttons (Minimize, Maximize, Close). If it fails on such basic task, I wonder where it crashes...
I thought this was about running windows 9x within linux. Is there such thing without virtualisation?
You can setup handlers to automatically launch windows executables using wine/proton .
This trickery is called binfmt_misc , which is a linux kernel system to associate random binary files with custom userspace 'interpreters'
I have had it working in the past. And while it is kinda neat I prefer manually running 'wine program.exe' to have a bit more control.
I have seen reports that a binfmt_misc setup + wine is good enough to get infected by certain windows viruses ;-P
Is wine compatible enough with Iloveyou.vbs?
If I can get this to work (haven't tried yet) it directly solves a problem I have right now this week right here in 2026, 30 years after Windows 95 was even a thing.
Yes, I have weird problems. I get to look after some very weird shit.
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.
When backward compatibility used to mean something man!
If you're dealing with weird legacy 9x systems in 2026, another headache you've probably run into is getting them to talk to the modern web (since modern TLS and JS completely break old browsers).
I actually built a win9x compatibility mode into BrowserBox specifically for this kind of weirdness. You run the server on a modern system and launch it with bbx win9x-run, and it proxies the modern web to legacy clients. It works surprisingly well with IE5, IE6, and old Netscape on Windows 95/98/NT. Might be a fun addition to your retro utility belt!
Tell us more!
Probably works for a bank.
And likely in ATM servicing.
Just few months ago seen windows 95 error message on HSBC ATM.
Little late but would this have actually allowed running early Linux under Windows when Windows 95 came out in the 90s? I remember only dual booting being available at that time.
Incredible that current Linux kernels still have 486 support!
Which is really weird because I thought it didn't, per https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/linux_kernel_drops_48...
Maybe there's some detail I don't quite follow, like is has support for 486, but only those with a built in FPU?
from the same commenter who effused
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.
Speaking of vintage IE and Netscape on old Win, it's actually still possible to use them to browse the modern web if you proxy it.
I built a Win9x compatibility mode for BrowserBox that does exactly this (https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/blob/main/readme-fi...). Ur modern server does all the rendering, and it outputs a client link specifically designed for legacy browsers like IE5, IE6, and Netscape running on Windows 95/98/NT, streaming them the pixels. It's definitely an abomination, but there's something magical and retro that I like about viewing the 2026 internet through an IE6 window ;) ;p xx
There are better ways:
- Retrozilla with some about:config flags disabling old SSL cyphers and new keys to enable newer ones
- Iron TCL maybe with KernelEx and BFGXP from https://luxferre.top reading gopher and gemini sites such as gemini://gemi.dev proxying all the web bloat and slimming it down like crazy
- Same Gemini URL, but thru http://portal.mozz.us/gemini . Double proxy in the end, but it will be readable.
Is this Win4Lin resurrected?
Everytime I see something like this, I'm like, how in the hell did they learn and then figure this out? Congrats on this!!!! I will definitely have to play with this for some of that sweet nostalga.
Does this mean it runs on Linux or runs on Windows. I can never tell with this MS "subsystem" naming.
This could prompt me to finally assemble the Pentium desktop I have in storage in parts.
lol, if you do assemble that Pentium desktop, one of the first things you'll notice is that the modern web is completely unusable on it natively.
To get around that, I recently added a legacy compatibility mode to BrowserBox (bbx win9x-run). It basically lets you run the server on your modern daily driver, and access it via IE 5, IE 6, or Netscape on the Pentium box. It strips away the modern TLS/JS rendering issues and lets you actually browse the modern web from Windows 9x. Highly recommend giving it a spin if you get that machine built!
Oddly enough, I could kind of use this right now. I have some software which used SCSI (Adaptec WNASPI32.dll) calls to administer a device over the SCSI bus .. would this Subsystem be usable for that, or does it still require I build a WNASP32.dll shim to do translation?
So, you have Windows software. This "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux" just boots Windows 95. I don't know what you would use the Linux part for. Care to explain more what you want to do?
If you want to run your windows software in Linux, you could try Wine. Wine seems to have support for WNASPI so it's possible your software would just work. (You might have to run Wine as root I guess, to get access to the SCSI devices.)
If Wine doesn't work, Windows in QEMU with PCI passthrough to the SCSI controller might have better chances to work.
I need raw SCSI I/O to be virtualizable in the linux context, so I could run a Windows app (yes it already works in Wine), and have it 'see' a SCSI device as if it were real hardware.
Wines WNASPI32.dll is really just a facade - it doesn't provide actual SCSI services, its just there for SCSI-using apps to think they have ASPI onboard - so for my case I would need to write a shim to pass through SCSI IO requests to a Linux service - or loopback file? - to actually process the requests. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but if there is some way I can set up a loopback file under Linux to 'pretend' to be a SCSI block device for a Windows app, I'd sure like to know if its possible ..
Okay what is it with WSL naming, this always confuses me. Shouldn't it be Linux subsystem for Windows?
It’s a sub-system of Windows that is used for Linux.
It can work either way though.
Microsoft names of products turn around likes, e.g.
OpenOffice XML [1] -> Office Open XML [2]
[1] https://www.openoffice.org/xml/general.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
(Windows 9x) (Subsystem for Linux)
Yeah, you'd think from this that it is running Linux on Windows 9x.
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...
Should have called it LINE.
also trademarked
> Because we cannot name something leading with a trademark owned by someone else.
And this WSL project is going to run into the same problem.
Windows' subsystem for Linux
"Windows subsystem" was an existing term of art on the NT architecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#Architecture
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".
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.
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.
No natural language is inherently imprecise. Every language has its own system to resolve vagueness or ambiguity and elaborate on the supposedly "missing" features of the language. This issue is relatively settled in linguistics.
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".
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
The Showstoppers book by G. Pascal Zachary is an entertaining account of NT uprising.
It's a dominance thing. Classic abuser behaviour.
That's cool
I mean it's like trying to balance a cybetruck into 4 skateboards and flunging it over a hill cool