The naming of WSL sort of makes sense because it’s actually build upon a kernel feature, which hass been mostly unused for more than a decade, called subsystems. There’s the ‘subsystem for Win32’, which is the primary one that all Windows applications use, and then there were also the ‘subsystem for POSIX’ as well as the 'subsystem for ‘OS/X’. WSL was simply a reboot of that technology.
The funny part is that this turned out to be too complex so WSL 2 ditched all that and simply uses a VM running the actual kernel in the background, so the name isn’t even accurate anymore.
The naming of WSL sort of makes sense because it’s actually build upon a kernel feature, which hass been mostly unused for more than a decade, called subsystems. There’s the ‘subsystem for Win32’, which is the primary one that all Windows applications use, and then there were also the ‘subsystem for POSIX’ as well as the 'subsystem for ‘OS/X’. WSL was simply a reboot of that technology.
The funny part is that this turned out to be too complex so WSL 2 ditched all that and simply uses a VM running the actual kernel in the background, so the name isn’t even accurate anymore.