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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

By microsoft's naming scheme this should be Linux Subsystem 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.

> WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel

Pretty sure it's the other way around. But I haven't had my coffee yet ;)

Microsoft's naming scheme confuses me every single time though: "Windows Subsystem for Linux" actually runs Linux on Windows...

You're correct: "WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel"

I missed the part that it runs on the bloody Windows 9x kernel, I was to busy thinking about modern 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?

Windows Subsystem for Word

Windows Program for Word

Don't you mean Copilot 365 .NET SharePoint Document Platform for Windows?

No it's the Word app which is included in your organization's Copilot 365 .NET SharePoint license assuming you know how to trigger the download. The chatbot the license is named after doesn't have a clue either so good luck.

It runs Linux with Windows underneath it, hence Windows is the subsystem being subordinate (in the most literal sense where it simply means "order" with no further implications) to Linux.

Per wongarsu's post, something like the OS/2 Subsystem is an OS/2 system with Windows beneath it, but the OS/2 Subsystem is much smaller and less consequential, thus subsidiary (in the auxiliary sense) to Windows as a whole.

Isn't marketing fun?

This is how we end up with hundreds of products that provide "solutions" to your business problems and "retain customers" and upwards of a dozen other similar phrases they all slather on their frontpages, even though one is a distributed database, one is a metrics analysis system, one handles usage-based billing, one is a consulting service, one is a hosted provider for authentication... so frustrating trying to figure out just what a product is sometimes with naming conventions that make "Windows Subsystem for Linux" look like a paragon of clarity. At least "Linux" was directly referenced and it wasn't Windows Subsystem for Alternate Binary Formats or something.

I agree. Don't have a citation now, but I remember reading that this was a copyright problem. They wanted to name it "Linux Subsystem for Windows", but apparently the Linux foundation does not allow unaffiliated projects to have a name beginning with "Linux", or something like that.

also bad for your product name to start with a competitors brand

You can parse it as "Windows (Subsystem for [running] Linux)"

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