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I still use Windows SUA for my unix needs on Windows. It allows me to do most things and provides real POSIX (except fork), but stuff like sensitive filenames and unix style permissions actually work with NTFS. OpenSSH runs as a real service, and so on. I don't understand why this subsystem never got much recognition and suacommunity.com is even dead now...

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Originally Windows had the concept of personalities and three were available Win32, OS/2 and POSIX.

OS/2 went away, as soon as, OS/2 stopped being relevant.

POSIX was there mostly to get the foot into the door of US government, due to its requirements in POSIX compatibility.

I guess when this stopped being required and Win32 was accepted as viable platform, there wasn't a business case to keep on spending resources in POSIX support.

After all, Windows is not alone in lack of full POSIX support when one looks to embedded and mainframe OS as well.

It's deprecated now, but it is still there in Windows 8, and can be used for a lot of things not even possible in 'build to win32' scheme.

I thought it was fully removed in 8, but I am yet to upgrade.

I've read about Windows SUA (and it's predecessors) but have never been sure what problem it solves for me.

Got a use case or two?

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