Hacker News Reader

Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

A "Linux subsystem" is a Linux system that is a part of a bigger system. And "Linux audio subsystem" is an audio system that is a part of Linux. And if you swap the words, you get "audio Linux subsystem" which doesn't make sense, not really.

So the proper name would be "Windows Linux subsystem", but I concede that it does sound really weird (because both Windows and Linux are the same kind of things, they're OSes).

And of course, if it was named "Windows's Subsystem for Linux", there would be much less confusion, but apparently the English for some reason doesn't use the possessive case here (although that's the perfect place for it) and prefer to use the noun as a possessive adjective.

View on HN

This is helpful, but the composition rules are weird and confusing.

It's true that a Linux Subsystem is a subsystem of Linux, but an "X for Linux" is a component of Linux or an application for Linux.

When you put them together, it seems that the "for" wins the battle. In parsing terminology, it has lower precedence (though I'm sure the actual rules of English are more complex than that indicates).

I'd love to see an actual linguist comment on why this phrase is so confusing.

I have an English degree and can confidently say the issue is the implicit understood possessive in the correct parsing. As it stands, “for” dominates mentally because the phrase obviously needs a possessive to make sense and “for” denotes possession. If it were “Window’s Subsystem for Linux” or “DOS’s Subsystem for Linux”, explicating the proper possession, the parsing trouble would disappear.

So would just saying Linux subsystem for windows.

Which was raised when this name came up but they didn't like that Linux came first so went with gymnastic language instead.

Its even more obvious with this new name.

Its a Linux subsystem for DOS.

You could use the possessive form here: "Windows' Subsystem for Linux", but that's not a thing product managers like to use in naming...

It probably had an internal name like "winix" or "lindows" - but PM took the reins and came up with a much worse name, as is tradition.

Oh yes. My favourite example is [0] (and the parent twit).

[0] https://twitter.com/ericlippert/status/1205372172534874112

Oh, true, Linux actually uses the term in that context, somehow didn't think of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com