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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft will release their own Wine-a-like subsystem some time soon.

It's the missing link, and I can't see them ignoring it given how their direction has changed over the last few years.

I doubt that's the case. Everything they've been doing with WSL is precisely to keep you inside the Windows OS. It doesn't make sense to go the other way and give you a reason to use Linux instead.

> It doesn't make sense to go the other way and give you a reason to use Linux instead.

It makes sense for every business unit except Windows to make it easier to run their software on Linux/MacOS (for desktop software, more the latter, for server software, more the former.) A common shim that lets you so that with the same codebase rather than maintaining separate Linux and MacOS versions or porting the whole existsling software to a cross-platform base rather than a Windows base makes some sense.

Of course it doesn't make sense for the Windows unit to promote Linux, but Windows isn't all of Microsoft.

I could be wrong, but I think the overlap of people who use Linux but would also pay for Microsoft software like Office is small enough to not justify the engineering effort.

That was what WSL v1 was, literally.

WSL v2 is an actual linux kernel. They're moving in the opposite direction.

This makes no sense. Microsoft is on the way to bring Linux inside Windows. They have zero competitive advance, fomenting another system at this moment.

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