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Microsoft deprecates Subsystem for UNIX, recommends open source instead

3 Comments

I am getting started with the Windows Server 8 beta and noticed this in the list of Features Removed:

The Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is deprecated. If you use the SUA POSIX subsystem with this release, use Hyper-V to virtualize the server. If you use the tools provided by SUA, switch to Cygwin or Mingw.

Cygwin and Mingw are open source tools which let you use some Unix tools on Windows. That said, my preference would be the virtualisation route, rather than installing these layers on Windows Server itself.

3 thoughts on “Microsoft deprecates Subsystem for UNIX, recommends open source instead”

  1. Sounds like you never used SUA or Cygwin. They’re *not* comparable to virtualisation, they serve a different purpose.

    1. I have used them both. No, they are not “comparable to virtualisation”, but depending on what you need the UNIX services for you may be able to use a VM for that purpose instead.

      Tim

  2. Back in the day, the main point of Interix (later SUA) was not to provide the UNIX shell commands, but to make it easier to port UNIX workstation applications to Windows.

    I imagine all those engineering workstation applications have long since been totally Win32-ified … or moved over to one of the Linux variants. So it was no longer worth the engineering effort to keep it around.

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