The poor naming convention goes back ~20 years or so to (at least) "Windows Services for UNIX" (SFU) [0]. The naming was not intuitive then and it still isn't t

The poor naming convention goes back ~20 years or so to (at least) "Windows Services for UNIX" (SFU) [0]. The naming was not intuitive then and it still isn't today. The "problem" is that these products are not what you automatically assume they are! To illustrate: SFU provided NFS and NIS servers, a cron daemon, a telnet server, and various CLI "utilities" (i.e., standard "services" provided by "UNIX") running on Windows -- not Windows services that run on UNIX! Once you know that, the "Windows Services for UNIX" name kinda makes sense and helps to understand what the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" and, now, the "DOS Subsystem for Linux" actually are. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX