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Comment by curt15 | Hacker News Reader

If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality. UNIX(tm) is no longer so relevant compared to the early days of OS X, when Linux was still in its infancy and the Unix certification gave Apple street cred among developers. Most developers these days target Linux for production. That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.

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> That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.

Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.

SFU 1.0 and 2.0 relied on the MKS Toolkit by MKS/PTC, and SFU 3.0 later adopted the Interix (OpenNT) subsystem, which Microsoft acquired from Softway Systems in 1999.

The original POSIX Subsystem (psxss.exe) was Cutler's team who implemented a minimal POSIX.1 subsystem server alongside Win32 and OS/2. This was done primarily to satisfy US Federal Government procurement requirements (FIPS 151-2).

True, though to Microsoft's credit, the existence of the POSIX subsystem, even as a proof-of-concept, ensured the underlying kernel design supported the development of products like Interix, just as Windows on Alpha et al. ensured NT remained reasonably portable to future platforms like ARM, unlike say OS/2 where the only non-Intel release (for PowerPC) was basically a prerelease lacking core OS features like networking.

You're mixing it up with NT's "personalities" of which OS/2 was the primary target at the time. UNIX was purely for FIPS contracts

I think they are saying that "Unlike OS/2 itself (as a competing MS and then IBM product) had less thought and design went into it as a portable system, whereas NT was designed portable ground up"

SFU ended in XP/2003. Vista/2008 had SUA

That's correct, I put them in the same bucket though, as SUA was also based on Interix. So I consider SUA more as a rebranding, not something completely different like WSL.

IIRC SUA required recompilation. Putting the motto "Windows NT is a UNIX" to life was challenging, and introduction of incompatible SUA added multiple versions maintenance to the challenge.

WSLv1 worked via Unix Subsystem.

Proof? I couldnt find anything to that effect.

See my sibling comment about what it actually was.

It is hard to find, unless one knows the technical details.

Thx for tagging, lol

It wasn’t the Unix subsystem, but was a subsystem… it implemented the various Linux syscalls and binary format directly and forwarded them to the NT kernel, similarly to how the various win32 syscalls call into the NT kernel. So WSL was a “peer” of the win32 subsystem in the same way SFU or SUA was. But it wasn’t implemented “via” SUA.

Then in WSL2 they just switched to using a VM, which is way more boring but probably less work to keep up with (I’m sure the Linux kernel has a lot of stuff that needs translating/implementing and it’s simpler to just use a hypervisor)

No it did not, it used Drawbridge OS research for Library OSes, which was integrated into Windows.

WSL 1.0 was a Drawbrige picoprocess.

Your confusion is natural among those that aren't into Windows programming.

Here are the links for the related information,

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge

WSL 1.0 architecture,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...

I’m pretty sure Federal procurement is the big driver of relevance for this certification. They have always had a huge Fed business.

If they are in fact dropping it, that’s why. But… Apple often “finishes” the enterprise features with a point release.

Sure, I just hope macOS doesn't end up doing some custom thing rather than staying Unix/Linux like, which we've had with macOS/OS X till now.

Linux has been effectively Unix™ for me ever since the days when Dennis Ritchie indicated that he used Linux for everything on his web page. Late 2000s at the latest, maybe early 2000s. Unix enough for Dennis should be Unix enough for anyone.

Caring about which systems are branded UNIX is like caring about which NBA player was paid to endorse a particular brand of athletic footwear.

Given the millions involved, plenty of people do.

I've been using Linux for 30+ years now and have always considered it free (as in speech) Unix. For my purposes, the difference was always more legal and philosophical than practical. Of course, I was a student back then and didn't need to run the commercial software of the time.

Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.

In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.

He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.

As for the original UNIX,

"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"

-- Rob Pike

Yes, Unix = Linux for all intents and purposes in 2026. When I started in the early 90s, there was a galaxy of Unices - SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and many others people people don't even remember (ConvexOS anyone?). Heck, back then if you wanted to run a particular software for your industry, you might have to buy and install a specific proprietary Unix.

Today? It's all Linux or Windows (of course, now also Web/SaaS). All these different Unices have fallen by the wayside in favor of Linux. Yes, some are still around but the mindshare has been in Linux for the last 20 years.

I suspect you could rip out a ton of autoconf rules and no one would notice.

There's still a lot of people on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc

There is plenty of mindshare on game consoles, and embedded OSes, in both cases, POSIX while not being GPL has a very high value.

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