Wine fans have a reason to smile today. Wine 11.0 is finally here, and it is a big deal for anyone running Windows software on Linux. After a full year of work, more than six thousand code changes, and hundreds of bug fixes, Wine is moving forward in a way that feels like a turning point. This release tightens up major subsystems, improves performance, expands hardware support, and carries a big win for compatibility. If you have been waiting for Wine to feel smoother and a little less fussy, 11.0 might be the moment you jump back in.
I mean, could you trust a company that created a Linux container subsystem for Windows and named it Windows Subsystem for Linux to name things correctly?
Windows has subsystems. They’re called Windows Subsystems. This one’s for Linux. However you slice it, the initialism has to have WS in it.
People do not realize that Windows has, and has had, other subsystems. So the name seems dumb.
When you realize that as far back as 1993 there was:
then Subsystem for Linux does not seems as crazy.
Having “for Windows” at the end sounds natural if you only have one but putting saying “Windows subsystem for” makes more sense when you realize there are a bunch of them.
Regardless, the decision was made 30 years ago and not recently as people assume.
The obvious choice is to rename Wine to Linux Subsystem for Windows
“Linux on Windows Subsystem” or “Windows Subsystem: Linux” or “Lin4Win” anything would be better
It’s not the ‘Linux on’ subsystem, it’s the ‘Linux on Windows’ subsystem, so it’d have to be Linux on Windows Windows Subsystem, which would be silly. It can’t have a colon in it as some command-line tools take a subsystem as an argument, and traditionally, Windows command-line tools have used colons the same way Unix has used equals, i.e. to separate an argument name from its value, and parsing that gets harder when you’re expecting colons in the value, too.