<story><title>DOS Subsystem for Linux</title><url>https://github.com/haileys/doslinux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plus</author><text>There are a ton of comments here that seem to be misunderstanding what this software is. This creates a WSL-like environment on a DOS host system. It does not create a DOS environment on a Linux host. I&amp;#x27;m not sure where this misunderstanding even comes from; the name is perfectly analogous to WSL.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iherbig</author><text>I would imagine it&amp;#x27;s because WSL is a terribly confusing name itself for a lot of people.&lt;p&gt;There are two ways to read &amp;quot;Windows Subsystem for Linux&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;1. This is a subsystem that runs on Windows that enables Linux binaries.&lt;p&gt;2. This is a subsystem that runs on Linux that enables Windows binaries.&lt;p&gt;The confusion comes in the fact that when I write those two sentences, I naturally want to write &amp;quot;This is a subsystem FOR Windows...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;This is a subsystem FOR Linux... .&amp;quot; I had to consciously avoid using &amp;quot;for&amp;quot; in that sentence to highlight the problem.&lt;p&gt;So when someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t know what the thing does reads &amp;quot;Windows Subsystem for Linux&amp;quot; they may walk away with the false impression that the subsystem allows Windows binaries to run on Linux. Likewise, what you&amp;#x27;re seeing now is that people are seeing &amp;quot;DOS Subsystem for Linux&amp;quot; and thinking that this enables you run DOS on Linux.</text></comment>
<story><title>DOS Subsystem for Linux</title><url>https://github.com/haileys/doslinux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plus</author><text>There are a ton of comments here that seem to be misunderstanding what this software is. This creates a WSL-like environment on a DOS host system. It does not create a DOS environment on a Linux host. I&amp;#x27;m not sure where this misunderstanding even comes from; the name is perfectly analogous to WSL.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcoveson</author><text>They&amp;#x27;re both phrased unnaturally, IMO.&lt;p&gt;The suffix &amp;quot;for Linux&amp;quot; strongly implies it&amp;#x27;s software for use on Linux. It&amp;#x27;s like the &amp;quot;4j&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;4win&amp;quot; suffixes, implying software built for the Java and Windows environments, respectively.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s more, Windows or DOS as an adjective of subsystem bind more tightly than &amp;quot;for Linux&amp;quot;. So if you were to start dropping parts of the name, you&amp;#x27;d drop &amp;quot;for Linux&amp;quot; first. Except you can&amp;#x27;t, because then it&amp;#x27;s just the Windows Subsystem.&lt;p&gt;LSW would have been a much more natural name. In a conversation about Windows subsystems, you could refer to it as the Linux Subsystem. If other operating systems picked up on the idea, they would have their own Linux subsystems, e.g. Linux Subsystem for macOS. If you wanted to check if your OS had anything like it, you could search &amp;quot;is there a Linux subsystem for FreeBSD?&amp;quot; Which might turn up results about the Linux ABI in FreeBSD. Speaking of which, imagine if it had been named the FreeBSD ABI for Linux. What an awful pattern! You can&amp;#x27;t even repeat the pattern unless both modifiers are proper nouns! Could you have called the VFS Subsystem the &amp;quot;FreeBSD Subsystem for VFS&amp;quot;?</text></comment>