Os/2 basically ran a copy of windows (either the existing one or bundled one) to then execute windows programs side by side with os/2 (and DOS) software.

https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...

“ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy. Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”

Now I only experienced something close to that when I set up multiseat on single PC with AMD and Nvidia GPUs and one of them decided to fall asleep. Or when I undervolt GPU too much.

However, there are certain APIs like WDDM timeout detection and recovery: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... . It is like a watchdog that'll restart the driver without BSOD'ing. You'll get a crash dump out of it too.

I swear sometimes progress goes backwards..

Under Windows everything including the GPU driver can crash. As long as it didn't take the kernel with it, causing a BSOD. Your applications can keep running.

The only way to get this compatibility in Linux would be to port those features all over to Linux and if that happened the entire planet would implode because everyone would say “I knew it! Embrace Extend Extinguish!” At the same time.

That said, to address the grandparent comment’s point, it probably should be read as “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Applications)”.

That's not what I say, that's what the former PM Lead of WSL said. To be fair, Windows Services for UNIX was just Unix services for Windows. Probably the same logic applied there back then: they couldn't name it with a leading trademark (Unix), so they went with what was available.

WSA and WSL both coexisted for a time.

It was called Project Astoria previously. Microsoft releasing the Windows Subsystem for Android for Windows 11 is news to me. I thought that they had killed that in 2016.

Anyway, Astoria was an internal product which management ultimately killed, and some of the technology behind it later became WSL and much later, WSA. WSA's inital supported OS was Windows 11.

Microsoft being Microsoft, they artificially handicapped WSA at the outset by limiting the Android apps it could run to the Amazon App Store, because that's obviously the most popular Android app store where most apps are published. [rolls eyes] I don't think sideloading was possible. [rolls eyes again]

I don't work for Microsoft and I never have; I learned all of this from watching Windows Weekly back when it was happening, and from a few videos by Dave Plummer on YouTube.