Re: Emacs on Ubuntu advice

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuri Khan <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2017 12:49:15 +0700
> Cc: Fabrice Popineau <address@hidden>,
>       Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> 
> On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > 1. It sounds like this is really the Windows Subsystem for GNU/Linux.
> 
> More like GNU/“Windows Subsystem for Linux”. It is literally the GNU
> userspace (as distributed by Ubuntu) working over a Microsoft
> reimplementation of the Linux kernel API.

Actually, the WSL is neither GNU nor Linux.  It is a collection of
kernel drivers and other OS components required to run on Windows
ELF64 executables that issue Linux syscalls.  That's what the term
"Windows subsystem" means: it is not about utilities or user-space,
it's about system services that create a certain environment which
applications of some class need in order to run.  According to MS,
none of the WSL is Linux or GNU code, they say it's all a "clean-room
implementation" of the Linux APIs.

What Mike Gerwitz calls "GNU/kWindows" is not the WSL, it includes the
WSL, the Windows NT OS kernel and other core OS components, and
whatever applications the user decided to install on top of that from
the Ubuntu distribution sites, not all of it free software, let alone
GNU (according to https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html).

If we want to chastise people for their inaccurate terminology, let's
at least be accurate ourselves.