Hacker News Reader

Comment by classified | Hacker News Reader

Oh, no, not more of this backwards mis-naming illogic. It's bad enough that MS abuses us with such idiocy, we don't have to copy it.

View on HN

At least Microsoft is internally consistent for once and and naming it after an older similar project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

Based on Microsoft’s ability to plan and manage product naming I think you stumbled on a coincidence there rather than actual intent.

I think the concept of "sub system" is quite integral to the NT kernel. Might have been easier if they had stolen the name from user-mode linux - which might be more suitable for wsl2 in some ways... But that was/is a quite different type of project:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux

See "Win32 environment subsystem" and "OS/2 environment subsystem" here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

Then there was coLinux: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux

Maybe they should've called it LINE (after WINE)....

Yes fair point.

However WSL2 is just a heavily disguised Hyper-V virtual machine with lots of weirdness around it rather than a proper NT subsystem.

They could change the documentation they used for WSL 1, and make people even more confused.

I too was scratching my head as to why anyone would ever want to run a macOS terminal from within linux.

I've wanted to do it. Mostly to test out stuff that my colleagues would need to run but haven't been able because I run Linux. So I usually have to ask colleagues to double check my work.

I am aware that running macOS on non-Apple hardwade would be against their ToS.

You kid, but I often wish I could run iTerm on my Linux workstations.

I've switched from iTerm2 to Alacritty. It requires a different config per OS, but it works cross-platform. I combine it with tmux.

I'd love to have a simple way to compile stuff for macOS from Linux.

For running xcode and building ios apps in a ci pipeline? Eg with darling[1] and godot: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.6/development/compiling/cr...

[1] https://www.darlinghq.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com