They didn't make WSL for the benefit of mankind though, they made it so that Windows would be a better, more competitive product for developers.
If Linux distro vendors want to be more competitive for Windows users then they will have to take the initiative to improve Wine, the same way Microsoft took the initiative to support Linux apps on their own platform. It doesn't make any sense for Microsoft to take both torches and kill their own competitive advantage. They would rather have people use their own platform, Windows, which they clearly believe is the better one.
Actually they made it for the developers that buy Apple hardware to develop for GNU/Linux, which are now unhappy that Apple only focus on the developers that actually target their eco-system.
The GNU/Linux developers unwilling to support GNU/Linux hardware vendors are the ones to blame.
People that buy Apple hardware, giving money to Apple, then bitch about Apple not supporting developers, when they actually only care about developing for GNU/Linux, and use macOS as a pretty "Linux".
If they really cared, like myself (1215B owner), they would be giving money to Tuxedo, System 76, Dell, Asus, and whatever else that is shipping hardware with Linux distributions pre-installed.
Guilty as charged. But damn, every time I used Linux on laptops up to 2012, batteries would invariably run out in 2 hours max, sleep/hibernate would fail half the time, fans would never stop, and 3d drivers were a tire fire... It has been nice not having to think about all of that for almost a decade.
I am very tempted to go back to Linux sometime next year, but I really fear I'd end up in the same situation (or worse, since I'm also reliant on scaled HiDpi screens now and support for that sort of thing is completely absent in some distros).
A lot of people here talk about Linux making laptops die really soon but I have no clue what the hell y'all are talking about. For me switching to Linux normally makes the battery go 2-5x slower. The laptop on which I'm typing (a T420) lasted half an hour on Windows 10 and two hours on Debian when it had the original battery, now that I've replaced it it gets 5hrs on Linux and maybe two max on Windows 10. About the same on Windows 7.
Of course it depends on how you configure it but if you've really de-bloated your system you can get much more out of the battery than Windows can. I've been able to get more battery out of a recent Inspiron, a less recent Toshiba Satellite, this Thinkpad, and an old Samsung netbook, so I could be biased by my hardware.
Nowadays it's much easier to get higher-level Linux support, too.
WSL's origins are actually as a android subsystem for when they where making a mobile play with the Windows Phone. At the time it ultimately got scraped because it was too ambitious of an undertaking, and got spun off as WSL. Now that android[0], windows OS and WSL[1] are more mature it's going full circle.
[0] maintaining an android subsystem (and various versions as distros) should be easier now for the same reason it's easier for vendors to update phones, project treble.
[1] better filesystem sharing, GPU pass through, WSL is close to natively supporting graphical applications, etc
I don't have a good source at hand, but there was even a preview version of Windows 10 Mobile available that had support built in. You could get it from the insider program. Now that the whole ecosystem gets wound down it becomes incredibly frustrating trying to revisit those old systems. You can easily recreate installs of Windows 98 or XP in various flavors and patch levels, but for Windows Phone this has become mostly impossible.
For example, the store for WP8.1 and older has shut down, so you can no longer get the app for upgrading to 10. There was a tool released by the end of 2019 that can do it via USB, but that stopped working in October since the server it contacts now requires TLSv1.2, and the tool was written in .NET 4 which doesn't do 1.2 by default. So there is a registry hack you can use to enable it again, until eventually that doesn't work anymore either. There are inofficial, incomomplete mirrors of some device specific factory images, and the pretty awsome "windows phone internals" tool for rooting and modding some devices, which was mostly a one man show.
With said tool and a lot of patience, it should still be able to get one of the two insider builds of win10mobile running that had android emulation, given you find the instructions, all the files and images required. And then it's still only an alpha version that emulates the Android 4.4 API.
I have a friend whos working on software archival, so through him I became aware of the importance of trying to preserve these kind of things, and those very closed and additionally niche platforms are the second hardest thing to preserve, after cloud services.
It's been a good while since I read the original story, but Wikipedia [0] has some background and should have some citations if you want to dig in further
>They would rather have people use their own platform, Windows, which they clearly believe is the better one.
They likely don't believe this. Any sane technical person should believe that a Unix-based OS (or something better) that can run Windows programs would be superior. They just need to keep everyone in that awful crabpot because it gets them money.
Same with DirectX vs. OpenGL, historically: "In December of 1996, Carmack released a document that outlined his grievances with the Direct3D API. He outlined the differences between the APIs by comparing the code required by both APIs to draw a triangle to the screen; OpenGL required only four lines of code in his samples, while Direct3D required a plethora of commands and assignations.
Carmack's blunt way of explaining things was so damaging to Direct3D's reputation that Direct3D developer Alex St. John posted a follow up in February of 1997 defending his API and strangely enough for Microsoft admitting its flaws."[0]
>> Any sane technical person should believe that a Unix-based OS (or something better) that can run Windows programs would be superior.
I find that such statement always lack a well-stated assumption/goal: i.e. superior "for what"?
It's easy for most of us to say a Ferrari is superior to RAV4... but if we don't explicitly scope-limit, there's going to be some disappointed IKEA shoppers :D
In terms of Unix, I use AIX full time at work for servers (let's not go there;), Linux on some servers and desktops. But I'm certainly not going to install Linux for my wife or mother in law - I'm a proponent and an enthusiast but not a masochist and I do not want to constantly fix and explain the differences.
Perhaps less controversially, for my gaming & photo-editing PC, Windows "just works". I don't worry about install, drivers, maintenance, distros, anything. It's been rock stable through Win7-Win10 updates from 2013 through now with no reinstalls or hassle.
Is that a personal anecdote - of course it is; but if we're going to make sweeping "it's superior" statements, I feel we must state the scope/goal. So very very very few things in life are superior for everything to everybody :-/
If Linux distro vendors want to be more competitive for Windows users then they will have to take the initiative to improve Wine, the same way Microsoft took the initiative to support Linux apps on their own platform. It doesn't make any sense for Microsoft to take both torches and kill their own competitive advantage. They would rather have people use their own platform, Windows, which they clearly believe is the better one.