Windows used to have those things. Windows 8 was where they removed it. I believe the official answer nowadays is "run a Unix using Hyper-V."

Well, no, they didn't remove it; its been a separate component for a long time, and with Windows 8 they restricted it to Windows 8 Enterprise and Server 2012. (Though I think the Windows 7 version can actually be used in Windows 8.)

It's deprecated in Windows Server 2012:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx

I believe it was removed with 2012 R2.

I wonder if it was because nobody used it? It must have been a large thing to maintain and test every release.

It was gaining popularity at the point where they killed it; there was this real buzz, a feeling that this really cool thing was finally spreading to more people.

> It was gaining popularity at the point where they killed it

Was it? As far as I can tell, it had been losing popularity for a long time before Windows 8, and it was rare and getting rarer that any nx-based project would recommend using it on Windows, though occasionally you'd find people outside the main projects with recipes for making it work (or horror stories of their attempts to do so.)

I felt like it was. Things like the gentoo-on-windows project were new and lively, and that company that was backing it was getting a bigger and bigger set of packages in their repo.

Inevitably that effort would still fall short, and therefore not really at all. The leverage of linux is the linux community, and the access. Not ls vs dir. IMO. In any case, if they provided the Windows 8 experience built right on top of linux (and all the binaries and everything still worked) it would be a marvel.