Windows service layer for Linux?
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Microsofts WSL is stupidly named. It shouldve been LSW.
While I do not disagree, it is important to realize that this was named in early 90’s.
When Windows NT was released, an important aspect of the architecture was the idea that it had “sub-systems” to provide app compatibility.
The Win32 sub-system (Windows apps) was just one of them. It’s full name was the Windows sub-system for Win32.
There was also the sub-system for POSIX (UNIX compatibility to win government contracts) and the sub-system for OS/2. OS/2 was interesting as it was still expected to be the important competitor and because it was originally going to be a Microsoft OS so Microsoft had customers that had written OS/2 apps.
The Windows sub-system for POSIX was never any good. It was just good enough to check boxes and win procurement contracts. Windows NT became quite successful and UNIX compatibility was not important.
That is, until Linux became popular.
So, when Microsoft added Linux application compatibility to Windows, it was naturally to call it the Windows sub-system for Linux.
I agree that the name sucks but it makes sense in a historical context.
Interesting, thanks for the lil summary :)
Wasnt there a ReactOS doing this?
Similar ideas but different approaches. ReactOS is trying to essentially reverse engineer Windows, whereas Loss32 is going to run literally everything in Wine.
I'm kind of excited about this one, because it's likely to uncover issues in Wine and upstream any improvements they make.
Lol love the idea. Hope it helps Wine like you said.
Yeah I've been thinking about this kind of thing recently. It should be possible to make things way more seamless. It could just have an entire emulated C drive in the home directory and automatically run exe files through WINE. Just associate the .exe file extension with the program you use to setup the environment and launch WINE for it.
I've basically done this for games and other programs using this desktop file:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Run with Bottles
Comment=Run directly with bottles
Icon=com.usebottles.bottles
Exec=bottles-cli run --bottle Gaming --executable %f
Terminal=false
NoDisplay=true
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;GNOME;GTK;
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=bottles
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/bottles;application/x-ms-dos-executable;application/x-msi;application/x-ms-shortcut;application/x-wine-extension-msp;
Keywords=wine;windows;
X-GNOME-UsesNotifications=true
Save as runwithbottles.desktop in ~/.local/share/applications
And remember to change --bottle Gaming to whatever bottle you want to use.
Now you can run any .exe by double clicking on it. If you associate it with 'Run with Bottles' This needs bottles to be installed, but allows you to run executables with Proton or Proton-GE too.
At least on PopOS you can just double click an exe installer and after the install it will show up in your start menu letting you run it through wine
Same with CachyOS, but Loss32 isn't just trying to run an on-demand emulation layer within your DE, it's trying to be the always-on default. It's ambitious, to be sure!
ReactOS is mentioned in the article, it's a somewhat different approach.
Is this Loss32?
💁🦋
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Now do it 32 times
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As long as we give people a simpler way/distro to get out of Windows do whatever crazy idea comes to mind.
Windows+Linux soon? Lmao
In before Linux/Copilot