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And how does having another box help you run a Linux tool like a bash script on Windows? This is as silly as the virtualisation argument. There are completely different use cases to having another OS available vs wanting to use a tool on your current OS that is only available on another one.

Anyone who compares this to "a linux box" or a virtual machine is missing the point, and obviously has never used https://www.cygwin.com/

Install Cygwin and use it to then install the openssh service.

Install Cygwin and use it to then install the openssh service.

% uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-10.0 hp15t 2.9.0(0.318/5/3) 2017-09-12 10:18 x86_64 Cygwin

Seems to have been last updated 12 September 2017. And Cygwin has a package manager, download it from https://www.cygwin.com/setup-x... and it see section 2.3 of https://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq... for running it on the command line.

Cygwin compiles GAMESS (https://www.msg.chem.iastate.edu/gamess/), Dalton (http://daltonprogram.org/), Octopus (http://octopus-code.org/wiki/Main_Page), babel (http://www.ccl.net/cca/software/UNIX/babel/index.shtml), OpenBLAS (http://www.openblas.net/), and xv (http://www.sonic.net/~roelofs/greg_xv.html) just fine, and of course gnuplot 4.6 patchlevel 6 (which I maintain to avoid an annoying bug in later versions) compiles and works as well. Perfect for people who publish results, not just make bash scripts only a few people ever see.

Compiling gcc version 7.2.0 was painless. Throw "set t_ti= t_te= syntax=none" in ~/.vimrc and
set ignoreeof noclobber filec history=500 prompt="hp \!% "
set cdpath=(. ~)
along with a few other things in ~/.login and you're set for life.

Or I can just apt-get install X. Seems less complicated does that not?

I do not like Cygwin as I found it hacky when I tried it last admitting 10 years ago. It uses posix to win32 call conversions like the inverse of wine and I am glad it has a package manager now. But if you still have to compile things maybe there are still issues?

The whole problem with this (yes it implies with WSL as well to an extent) is Windows is object based while Unix is text based. If you need automation on Windows PowerShell is really the only option to interact with WMI and CMI which is the heart of the Windows ecosystem. The reason for this is grep, sed, awk, and pipes are not designed to handle objects, but text.

According to Wikipedia WSL was not designed for admins, but for programmers who need to put something in node.js, mysql, etc. If you use the tools to connect to another box running Linux then putty will work just as well as a third party tool.

WSL will eventually come with the WSLPath to integrate somewhat. WSL to me is alot simpler than cygwin and even obsoletes it in many ways if you want a Linux environment that WILL WORK. But I reserve judgement as I have not used it in 10 years.

% uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-10.0 hp15t 2.9.0(0.318/5/3) 2017-09-12 10:18 x86_64 Cygwin

Seems to have been last updated 12 September 2017. And Cygwin has a package manager, download it from https://www.cygwin.com/setup-x... and it see section 2.3 of https://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq... for running it on the command line.

Cygwin compiles GAMESS (https://www.msg.chem.iastate.edu/gamess/), Dalton (http://daltonprogram.org/), Octopus (http://octopus-code.org/wiki/Main_Page), babel (http://www.ccl.net/cca/software/UNIX/babel/index.shtml), OpenBLAS (http://www.openblas.net/), and xv (http://www.sonic.net/~roelofs/greg_xv.html) just fine, and of course gnuplot 4.6 patchlevel 6 (which I maintain to avoid an annoying bug in later versions) compiles and works as well. Perfect for people who publish results, not just make bash scripts only a few people ever see.

Compiling gcc version 7.2.0 was painless. Throw "set t_ti= t_te= syntax=none" in ~/.vimrc and
set ignoreeof noclobber filec history=500 prompt="hp \!% "
set cdpath=(. ~)
along with a few other things in ~/.login and you're set for life.

Or I can just apt-get install X. Seems less complicated does that not?

I do not like Cygwin as I found it hacky when I tried it last admitting 10 years ago. It uses posix to win32 call conversions like the inverse of wine and I am glad it has a package manager now. But if you still have to compile things maybe there are still issues?

The whole problem with this (yes it implies with WSL as well to an extent) is Windows is object based while Unix is text based. If you need automation on Windows PowerShell is really the only option to interact with WMI and CMI which is the heart of the Windows ecosystem. The reason for this is grep, sed, awk, and pipes are not designed to handle objects, but text.

According to Wikipedia WSL was not designed for admins, but for programmers who need to put something in node.js, mysql, etc. If you use the tools to connect to another box running Linux then putty will work just as well as a third party tool.

WSL will eventually come with the WSLPath to integrate somewhat. WSL to me is alot simpler than cygwin and even obsoletes it in many ways if you want a Linux environment that WILL WORK. But I reserve judgement as I have not used it in 10 years.

https://www.cygwin.com/

I've done this. I have half a dozen macs (my kids all use mac minis), quite a few more Linux boxen, and exactly ONE windows box. (It's a gaming laptop. I've had it for 6 or 7 years now. Still going strong, though the graphics card is starting to show its age. To say nothing of the battery!)

Your windows box will get compromised / infected on a regular basis. You will be amazed at how easily that can happen! Definitely go with Chrome over IE, but, really, go with a Chromebook rather than risk webbrowsing & drivebys on a windows box.

One thing I cannot recommend highly enough: Get a CD/DVD drive, external if necessary. Boot off a Linux disk. Good o'l Redhat Fedora in "rescue" mode will suffice. Have an external drive, formatted for Linux, that you can hook up. Use "ntfsclone"! (Or, alternatively, even good o'l dd.) I've had to restore my windows box several times now. Being able roll it back to a safe place has been a lifesaver! It's also nice to be able to see if the windows restore partition was infected...

Practically speaking, what you want is a Win box for just games, and ideally just Steam at that. And then a Mac or Chromebook for everything else. And I do mean everything!

That said, you may want to install Cygwin on the windows box. Having a decent BASH or TCSH command line is a lifesaver! You might also want Libreoffice. Very useful, compatible with most MSWord files, and a lot cheaper than a microsoft subscription!

I was going to reply with "CreateProcess() isn't exactly fast." When compared with fork() in modern Linux, it isn't. But when I started digging into the Cygwin source to find the CreateProcess (or NtCreateProcess) that I knew it would inevitably call, I found it buried a lot deeper than I expected.

https://cygwin.com/git/gitweb....

Obviously, since WSL isn't open source, I can't dig into it and see what they're doing. But if I had to guess, I'd imagine they're doing something in kernel space that makes fork() at least as fast as CreateProcess().

Meanwhile Cygwin already does this and much more. Essentially bash on Win 10 that seems like an admission that powershell, whilst powerful, is about as an inelegant and clunky as it gets.

As a fallback my colleague did a installation of cygwin on Windows 10 and it seems to be broken after working flawlessly since XP. I've got a new install of Win10 for testing cygwin on as the Microsoft offering is pretty primitive. I don't understand why microsoft doesn't get behind the cygwin project and make it better as it already does what they are attempting to do, only better.

I hope you did not think I was running a Windows OS on my desktop. I think "xkill" would have been a dead giveaway. :-)

Not necessarily, but still.

Because it would be copyright infringement.

Zwaaaaa? Bash is GPL. Linux is GPL. Cygwin is GPL, and LGPL. Why would it be infringement?

There's no one single way, but there are several much more useful ways such that files created through Windows have the expected permissions in Cygwin (user read/write) and files created through Cygwin are accessible in Windows (user can read and write them). There's no excuse for the Linux subsystem not being able to do something reasonable. And yes I've dealt with Cygwin files in Windows and Windows files in Cygwin. It works because Cygwin understands Windows ACLs (see POSIX accounts, permission, and security). Amusingly the mapping system Cygwin uses was based on Microsoft's own mapping system from Services for Unix. So not only does Microsoft have the code for an example of a working method available (Cygwin's code), they wrote the code for a working method (SFU).

Cygwin - Get that Linux feeling - on Windows

Have a look at Cygwin. http://cygwin.com/ It's a free linux environment running under Windows. It's published by Redhat, who know a thing or two about linux. And not just console apps, it's got X and the associated graphical appslications.

Cygwin and the Linux Subsystem are completely different entities. Cygwin is an attempt to implement the POSIX API on the Win32 API set. Most applications will compile just fine under this emulated environment, and the applications are regular Win32 applications as far as Windows is concerned. The shell has been modified so it will append ".exe" when launching an image if it wasn't specified (because you can't do "ls" as it will fail (file not found), but "ls.exe" will succeed) These binaries are stnadard WinPE style binaries.

The Linux Subsystem is more akin to the FreeBSD Linux API layer - it runs Linux binaries unmodified, so the NTOSKRNL will natively load an ELF image, emulates the LInux syscall interface and provides all the necessary calls to make it appear you're running on Linux.

It's why Windows 10 can load Ubuntu 14.04 userspace - it's not a recompiled for Windows set of binaries, but everything that ships in Ubuntu 14.04 minus the Linux kernel.

> It's still marked as a beta right now. Hope they push hard and get
> into general availability this year. It's useful. Running unmodified
> console mode apps from the Ubuntu user space is a useful thing.

Have a look at Cygwin. http://cygwin.com/ It's a free linux environment running under Windows. It's published by Redhat, who know a thing or two about linux. And not just console apps, it's got X and the associated graphical appslications.

https://www.cygwin.com/

> What is it?
>
> Cygwin is:
>
> a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows.
>
> a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which provides substantial POSIX API functionality.

No need to accept Microsoft's half-assed implementation. With Cygwin, you get the whole kit+kaboodle. bash and various other shells. X Window client and server, Firefox, mutt, sendmail, whatever. Even gcc, so you can build from source. And it's free. If the PHBs at work insist, you can buy support from Redhat, who publishes it.

Untrusted X11 forwarding was meant to be a way to allow logins to unknown or insecure systems. It generates a cookie with xauth and uses the Security extension to limit what the remote client is allowed to do. But this is widely considered to be not useful, because the Security extension uses an arbitrary and limited access control policy, which results in a lot of applications not working correctly and what is really a false sense of security. This is true even today; I rebuilt XWin with Security enabled and 'ssh -X' into my linux VM, and got BadAccess errors from *any* GTK2 program. More on this subject:

http://www.openssh.com/faq.html#3.13
http://www.nsa.gov/selinuX/papers/x11/x93.html

Given the limited usefulness of untrusted X11 forwarding, *upstream* has disabled it by default in favour of other security models.

Btw, since the extension is disabled/not present the ssh -X falls back to ssh -Y (untrusted forwarding) on most systems.

nonsense, cygwin is trivial to set up and works wonderfully, have been using that for 20 years. cron and at jobs and all the major scripting languages, ssh/sftp/scp and yes even the X11 xterm works well

From their website cygwin is: a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows. a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which provides substantial POSIX API functionality.

I think the poster was confused by the ambiguous announcement and his lack of Linux/GNU knowledge. It doesn't look like Canonical is doing anything more then repackaging cygwin wither their branded installer.

I needed that functionality on Win 7, along with other tools.

Dropped Cygwin onto it, and it works pretty well.

http://cygwin.com/

Backwards compatibility- I'm really not aware of older Linux programs failing to work on modern Linux.

That's because you obviously don't play games on Linux. I give you loki_compat.

Linux is vastly more backwards compatible than Windows- hell, it even supports programs written for stuff from prior decades BEFORE IT EXISTED

NO. It supports source code like that. It doesn't support executables like that, or at least, not well. Compatibility problems abound.

What Windows has is a big user base. That's the limit of its power. It can't even run fucking bash and it's 2015- every real OS has supported that for over a decade.

Wrong again, chuckles. I give you Cygwin, and also [the now discontinued] Services For Unix, under which it was possible to compile bash.

a shitty shell that tries to look like DOS and fails

No, Windows now has three shells. One that looks like dos and succeeds brilliantly (command.com), one that is the original shell for NT (CMD.EXE) and one that's object-oriented and lends itself to typing commands several lines long, Powershell. Powershell does numerous things Unix shells don't.

Linux runs MOST windows programs, and MANY windows games.

Nonsense. You certainly can't use the wine compatibility guide as evidence, because Wine is THE poster child for regressions. I have never had a Windows game of any complexity work through more than a couple of Wine updates. I get it working, under some version of Wine, then I update my system and it breaks again. That's why I finally just gave up and built two totally separate PCs, one for Windows and one for everything else. Wine is awesome, and it is also shit.

Windows can't run a single fucking Linux binary without a goddamned VM!

And Linux can't run a single Windows binary reliably without a VM, which basically boils down to the same thing; either way, you need an OS in a VM for back compatibility.

Windows and Linux both have back compat problems, and pretending they don't is just bullshit. I've had to tweak programs' code for changes in the Linux kernel before, or libc, so suggesting that it magically supports old source code is also bullshit.

Backwards compatibility- I'm really not aware of older Linux programs failing to work on modern Linux. Maybe, somewhere, that's true- I certainly don't see it though. Linux comes packed in with standard utilities dating back to the damned 70s for fucks sake. Windows struggles just to support shit from the Windows XP era. Linux is vastly more backwards compatible than Windows- hell, it even supports programs written for stuff from prior decades BEFORE IT EXISTED.

You are mixing two different concepts and thus comparing apples and oranges: you're comparing source-level backwards-compatibility on Linux to binary-level compatibility on Windows. Yes, you can take old source-code and have it compile happily on a modern Linux-distro, but you're not running an old binary then!

It can't even run fucking bash and it's 2015

http://win-bash.sourceforge.ne... or https://www.cygwin.com/ -- Poof, bash on Windows.

Linux runs MOST windows programs, and MANY windows games. Windows can't run a single fucking Linux binary without a goddamned VM!

Another apples-to-oranges comparison. Linux does *NOT* natively run Windows-binaries, you have to run them under Wine. There is nothing stopping one from making a similar translator for running Linux-binaries under Windows, and there isn't that much of a difference between Wine and a full-blown VM.

No need for MS help when Cygwin exists. Furthermore, its super easy to setup.

You have to install the compiler repos just like a Linux user would.

You also might be interested in Cygwin:
http://cygwin.com/

and Windows Services for UNIX:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...

I can't find the bash icon in the Start menu. Anyone know where it is so I can remove it and avoid this exploit?

Thanks.

Don't remove it, just update it. Bash (from Cygwin) is one of the first things I install on Windows.

I use GNU/Windows ;-)

Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

Looks like the you are a windows user.
In which case, there is only one thing you need, and that's Cygwin. It is a GNU environment on Windows.

http://www.cygwin.com/

In what way exactly? I can use all the same GNU tools on Windows and OS X as you can on your enormously more cost effective Loonix box.

There. FTFY.

Oh, and yes that's completely true. cf. Cygnus Tools for Windows and, well, OS/X *is* UNIX.

>I am getting so desperate that I am starting to think of running Windows on my box, but that would be painful in so many other ways given my work environment >revolves around the Linux toolset." You could go full retard and install Windows + proprietary drivers and then either 1. setup a virtual Linux box or 2.use CygWin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ )

With the help of Cygwin there's more or less nothing I would ever do on a Unix/Linux system that I can't do on a Windows system, and do it easier, and typically faster and more reliably. And that includes software development targeted at Unix.

The inverse however, just isn't so and most likely never, ever will be.

So the choice is really:

The best of Windows + The best of Linux

vs

The best of Linux

Despite the fact that I'm an old school Unix guy and still strongly prefer it for my work systems (servers), the fact is Unix lost the "workstation" market a decade ago and there's just no sane reason to believe they'd ever capture the "gamer" market, for all the same reasons and more.

Ever heard of Cygwin? Or better yet, Cygwin/X? ;)

Ever heard of Cygwin? Or better yet, Cygwin/X? ;)

...Truth be told, I spend a considerable amount of my time in Konsole on the vm (Oracle client, and all the utils that are missing from windows like grep, sed, locate, cut).

In that case, what you want is Cygwin

...and don't forget Cygwin:

http://www.cygwin.com/

I only use putty because the laptop doesn't come with eXceed or some other X installation so I can use an xterm.

Install Cygwin . I use it on all my windows boxen. Full X support, Openssh, several shells (including bash, tcsh, pdksh and zsh), Perl scripts run unmodified (assuming the appropriate perlmods are installed) on it. The full GCC suite plus gmake, gdb, etc, etc, etc are available. If you have to run Windows, Cygwin is the way to go IMHO.

http://www.cygwin.com/
???

It sure does. cf. The Cygwin Project

Can't recommend that enough. Cygwin is the only thing making Windows into a usable operating system these days. You can even have Cygwin/X run on startup and run X apps on demand under Windows. If you don't need X, just install mintty. (You don't neeed separate installs for either, just select them in the Cygwin installer when installing it, and pin mintty to your Taskbar and/or copy the XWin Server shortcut to your Startup folder.)

Doesn't KDE run on Windows these days? You could probably just run KMail directly...

It sure does. cf. The Cygwin Project

Since version 1.7, Cygwin is able to make multiple files that differ only in letter casing. You need to make sure the filesystem is enabled for case-sensitivity though (this is also the case with SUA). See http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitive

There is a patch for Cygwin which gives it a huge speed improvement but it wasn't accepted because according to Christopher Faylor "The result is good but the patch isn't the way I chose to implement this." http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-patches/2011-q3/msg00030.html

cygwin is your friend.

I open a command/terminal window in OS X, pipe output to "less" (which is better than"more"), use vim, kill (-9 if necessary), grep (or egrep, and perl for more complicated conditional/structured searches and filtering), sed, control-C, etc. I use command-Q to quit a GUI program, command-H to hide it, command-W to close an active window, etc. I have a whole whack of tools sitting in the "Services" menu that can operate on selected text. I can cut-and-paste to and from my GUI programs and send that output into command-line programs (type "man pbpaste" and "pbcopy"). I can open a bunch of files from the command-line as if I had double-clicked them in the GUI by using the very useful "open" command.

If I'm running Windows, I don't suffer in the hell that is the MS-DOS command line, I have Cygwin installed, which is 10x better than what MS-DOS ever had. Linux has all the same command-line stuff and innumerable tools. I freely move my scripts between systems with only minor modifications (and pipe the output, a page at a time, to "less" on all of them). And I haven't even touched on Powershell, which I haven't used, but looks quite useful. If I really wanted the clicky old IBM PC-style keyboards to type on, they can be bought or often times found at used equipment stores.

This guy is in a bizarre world where he can have practically all the things he's pining for, but is apparently unaware of that fact. Systems haven't "devolved" (which is a meaningless term anyway), he's just passively accepted whatever has been plonked in front of him and apparently never cracked a manual or hunted for solutions to match his preferences. He's clueless. He's the one that is "devolving" or stagnating, while computer systems continue to grow and adapt, including hybrid systems that combine the best of GUI and command-line tools in ways that exceed what was previously available. The list of genuinely useful things that have been lost is a lot shorter than he suggests, and sure doesn't include address spaces with unprotected memory. It was simple, yes, but ye gods I wouldn't go back to that if you paid me to.

Anyone looking at the time stamps can see you're the one doing the stalking, you moron.

This is the stupid nutter known as "the hosts file guy", aka Alexander Peter Kowalski. He follows me everywhere ... in the last month, he's called me a b*tch, a c*nt, a russian botmaster ... he's claimed to defy both gravity and biology by growing another 2 inches in his 40's, so he's now "overweight" instead of "obese", and of course, the usual threats to sue for libel, which he does to everyone, then always backs down. He can't help it - he's obsessed.

For those who are curious about just how retarded the "apk troll" is - just follow the magic linkies. The guy is a real nutcase. But you too can help keep him busy - just post something anonymously saying he needs to get a life, or that his hosts file doesn't work, and he'll spend the next few weeks stalking me instead of spamming about his "miracle hosts file". He is *totally* p0wned at this point, and doesn't even realize it.

http://www.jeremyreimer.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4128 The "I have a lawyer and I'm going to sue the Internets" thread - very funny. Thee are updates on subsequent pages mixed in with the comments. Warning - it's 22 pages.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=891505&p=16510422#p16510422 - a collection of apk (Alexander Peter Kowalski) spam.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1046804
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=453001
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/APKware/index.html screenshots

After getting kicked off a few other places (ntcompatible, etc) needs to find another place to push APK "toolkit" so he got himself an account on sourceforge with nothing in it - no projects, no code, and started
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161862&cid=13531817 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158310&cid=13263898&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&mode=nestedsecond sighting on slashdot

If you follow the non-slashdot threads, you 'll learn that:

1. APK is 44 years old and really does live still with one or both of his parents (or another relative);
2. APK can't write software for shit;
3. APK stopped hosting it with download.com because he could use the $80 fee for buying better hardware instead (no wonder he posts on a 400hz computer),
4. His "programs" generally consist of nothing more than easy-to-code front-ends to edit ini files (his "graphic accelerators", for example) in Delphi, or "code that will remove duplicate entries from a hosts file" (never heard of cat /etc/hosts | sort | uniq > hosts.uniq)? Oops, my bad - Windows only - so grab a copy of cygwin instead :-)
5. his fav. languages as of 2 weeks ago are Delphi and RealBasic

   I am more of a fan of tools like REAL BASIC and DELPHI because they produ

"And when's the last time you edited photos, video, or audio with a CLI?"

For images, that's what Imagemagick or netpbm are for, and I use them all the time. I've also used ffmpeg for video, although not as frequently. If I had to use a GUI for the same tasks (hundreds of images), I'd probably give up in frustration. For batch operations there's nothing better than a CLI.

As others have noted there is a place for both CLI and GUI operations. It is disappointing to see how many people think a GUI is the be-all and end-all of computing. I wouldn't want to use a system if a CLI wasn't available in some form as an option because for some tasks it is the best choice. Hmmm.... although if I was forced to use MS-DOS as the only CLI option ("C:\ prompt") I could see people's point. It's truly awful, and I don't touch it on Windows. I install Cygwin. Anyone who has only experienced MS-DOS as their CLI experience doesn't really know what's possible.

Yep agree with what you wrote. The guy is clueless. As an aside, I should mention you can actually use those unixy tools on windows:

http://www.cygwin.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778
http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/

apt-get install cygwin

;)

Seriously, though: http://cygwin.com/ has windows binaries of common GNU tools, like wget, and can automagically add itself to your path when you install it. (I think? Maybe you have to do that part manually.) Then, you can wget to your heart's content.

Found it. That took all of 20 seconds of googling. Let's see how long it takes slashdot to let me repost.

http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-mapping

Still kinda curious about local overrides to global settings though. Does windows have that concept?

Windows Vista and Seven doesn't run old 3.1 or 95/98 apps.

Windows 7 Pro comes with an included copy of Windows XP to run in a virtual machine, and an old copy of Windows 3.1 from an eBay or CL seller will run in the DOSBox emulator. Yes, you lose some performance to virtual machine overhead, but how fast was a typical Windows 3.1 or Windows 98 box anyway? And just as you can install these into Windows 7, and just as you can install X11-on-Quartz into Mac OS X or X11-on-GDI into Windows, you'll still be able to install X11-on-Wayland into Ubuntu.

Linux is Unix, and X is a part of any proper Unix.

INVALID

I use Linux exclusively. At work, where I'm required to use Windows, so I run several Linux virtual machines. My kids run Linux. My servers run Linux. 90% of my Linux machines do not have X or any other windowing system. In my previous job, 100% of all Linux systems (several thousand) had no X server, hell, 99.99% of them were headless.

Linux is not Unix, it's LIKE Unix. X is not Linux - X runs in many environments - including OSX and Windows

If I had DOS then I could have installed an old version of cygwin and then got my favourite GNU tools working! Jobs would have had a fit it I could have done that.

Even worse, you could have run loadlin and run an old distro on your phone. Play with it a bit and I'm sure someone would have found another way of getting Android up and running on it. :)