41–50 of 459 posts
> We also already have a simple way to run Windows applications, Wine. Are you high? There is nothing simple about Wine. It's at once a kludgy mess and a technical masterpiece, what it isn't is simple.
So... this already exists. Valve already essentially sells this as a product. Folks know that, right? The Steam Deck is a linux box running wine executables as the native app environment. The fact that the money apps are all "games" doesn't change the technology.
How they do it is by shipping a franken-ubuntu14 as the "steam runtime" for native Linux games. Not a terrible solution but not exactly ideal for general purpose software where games mostly keep to themselves. Their work on Proton is amazing though.
I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…
Half of this incompatibility is because Linux is flexible, anyway. My system is different from your system, and did anyone test on both? If you want a more stable ABI then you need a more stable system.
That makes no sense: shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux, which is what flatpak/snap/appimage do. It can also be achieved with static linking and by shipping all needed library and using a shell script loader that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Also glibc (contrary to the author's false claims) and properly designed libraries are backwards compatible, so in p…
> shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux That doesn’t work for GUI programs which use a hardware 3D GPU. Linux doesn’t have a universally available GPU API: some systems have GL, some have GLES, some have Vulkan, all 3 come in multiple versions of limited compatibility, and optional features many of them are vendor specific. In contrast, it’s impossible…
I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…
https://support.codeweavers.com/en_US/2-getting-started/2-in...
I believe it started with Cedega, but I could be wrong. That's where I first recall encountering it.
I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…
> but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa
I think a lot of these problems could be avoided with a singular OS with the sole goal to support windows exes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How they do it is by shipping a franken-ubuntu14 as the "steam runtime" for native Linux games. Not a terrible solution but not exactly ideal for general purpose software where games mostly keep to themselves. Their work on Proton is amazing though.
Wait, isn't Steam OS Arch based now?
- Steam Runtime: A set of common libraries Linux native games target for multi-distro compatibility, I believe this still uses Ubuntu as the upstream
- Steam OS: An arch based distro pre-configured to run Steam out of the box, used by the Steam Deck, comes with extra stuff like gamescope to smooth over various issues other distros have with VRR, HDR, etc.
- Proton: Runs Windows games on Linux
So... this already exists. Valve already essentially sells this as a product. Folks know that, right? The Steam Deck is a linux box running wine executables as the native app environment. The fact that the money apps are all "games" doesn't change the technology.
That makes no sense: shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux, which is what flatpak/snap/appimage do. It can also be achieved with static linking and by shipping all needed library and using a shell script loader that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Also glibc (contrary to the author's false claims) and properly designed libraries are backwards compatible, so in p…
Got it. So everything is properly designed but somehow there's a lot of general incompetence preventing it from working. I'm pretty sure the principle of engineering design is to make things work in the face of incompetence by others.
And while glibc is backward compatible & that generally does work, glibc is NOT forward compatible which is a huge problem - it means that you have to build on the oldest bistro you can find so that the built binaries actually work on arbitrary machines you try to run it on. Whereas on Mac & Windows it's pretty easy to build applications on my up-to-date system targeting older variants.