[dbdoskey]

If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.

[pjmlp]

I can tell that if POSIX subsystem in Windows NT was actually a good enough UNIX experience, I would never bothered with those Slackware 2.0 install disks.

And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.

[dfox]

The original POSIX subsystem was just there so MS could say that it exists (and pass DoD requirements).

It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).

[tjoff]

WSL 1 works fine. I much prefer it over 2 because I only run windows in a VM and nested virtualization support isn't all there.

Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.

[f1shy]

That would not be unique, as is what BSD has done for Linux compatibility basically forever.

[TeMPOraL]

BSD and Linux are in the same bucket, so that doesn't count, not any more than MacOS compatibility with Linux. Windows is the odd one out.

[pjmlp]

Solaris did as well.