Indeed. I think you can see this in some of the history in this article: Interix was &quot;POSIX compatible&quot;, but essentially its own OS, like compiling for Linux versus BSD. So someone had to maintain binary builds of GNU tools for Interix and thus you ended up with the large &quot;Tools&quot; distribution of user space binaries. Ultimately, &quot;Tools&quot; was its own Unix distribution that was subtly incompatible with any other Unix distribution. Even today on Linux you still see a lot of the headaches in the subtle binary incompatibilities across Linux distributions.<p>The amazing thing with Ubuntu on Windows is that user space is the same Ubuntu distribution of user space tools as on Linux. That lessens the maintenance burden of the User Space considerably as Canonical is already actively maintaining that distribution, and will continue to actively maintain that distribution, and that there are a considerable number of users of that distribution on Linux already and a considerable ecosystem of third parties building for that distribution. Those are definitely the missing pieces that Interix never had and makes this &quot;Son of Interix&quot; that is Ubuntu on Windows much more interesting.