Yes, although that person probably retired long ago since the idea dates back to 1990 or so (NT Posix subsystem). The difference in modern times is someone convinced them to make it usable.

I might be remembering this wrong, but the posix additions to NT were done to fulfill a US defence department condition for bidding on systems[0]. They were never really useful in the same way that WSL is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

At the time NT came out, it wasn't 100% POSIX compliant, but close enough for government work.

One stipulation in NT's subsystem at the time was that fork() needed to be followed by exec().

https://www.cygwin.com/ is available since 1995

Cygwin was a great tool, and I've released some software which used cygwin, but almost all large programs ended up needing cygwin-specific patches (I maintained quite a few myself), while WSL2 (which is just a fancy VM), in my experience offers 100% linux compatibility, I've never had any issues with it except some VPN-related internet problems.

> I've never had any issues with it except some VPN-related internet problems.

I've had to support a development environment that ran on WSL2, among other things. I regularly had developers attempt to start work in the morning only to find an overnight WSL2 update from Microsoft rendered their WSL2 instance unusable. It typically took a few hours of uninstalling / reinstalling to fix it. But in at least one case after a series of these incidents that cumulated in them spending a day trying to get it going they gave up and switched to Ubuntu.

The only reason I'd use WSL2 over a real Linux install for Linux development is because of ISO 27001 / SOC 2 restrictions pushed from above. I don't have a clue why people would do it voluntarily. It's not only a fragile and incomplete implementation (especially on the networking side), it's also noticeably slower.

Absolutely this. It's usable, but just barely, and not even close to a replacement for a real linux system

While my observation is mostly limited to my laptop and couple of friends, I must day that both of those laptops are on Windows Insider, not even stable branch and I probably can remember couple of minor issues over last 3 years with WSL2, nothing like you described

Cygwin isn't remotely comparable in terms of compatibility. With WSL2 I can train stuff with PyTorch with GPU acceleration without configuring anything. Try doing that with cygwin.

> Honestly, whoever convinced Microsoft to make Linux run in windows was a genius.

Embrace.