He is missing the point. Flatpak/Snap are not just an alternative way to ship binaries. They are way to isolate applications and what they can do. Landscape has moved from protecting the system or an user from another to protect the same user applications and their data from each other, specially for desktop environments. That is not even in the map for Windows, its security model and its applications. It is a big jump backwards.
Convert Linux to Windows
51–60 of 459 posts
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#52So... 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.
Steam OS is clearly not what the blog is proposing, I can't just pop over the desktop mode and install Firefox via a MSI.
No[1], but you can launch a windows executable natively, link against DLLs in a compatible way, thunk between 32 and 64 bit as needed, access the Linux filesystem, network and IPC environment using native APIs, integrate with things like .NET and msvc runtimes, access native-speed DirectX emulation, etc...
Yes, you'd have to buff and polish it. But "paint some chrome on it" is hardly much of a blog post.
[1] Actually, are you sure the answer is "no" here? I wouldn't be at all shocked if some enterprising geek had source on github implementing a MSI extractor and installer
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#53That 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…
> 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. True, but sad. The way to achieve compatibility on Linux is to distribute applications in the form of what are essentially tarballs of entire Linux systems. This is the "fuck it" solution. Of course I suppose it's not unusual for Windows stuff to be st…
You could say the same about container images for server apps. (Packaging is hard.)
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#54A reverse OS X/Classic transition, if you will…
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#55I want the opposite: id like a way to run the windows kernel, drivers and most low level OS stuff by windows, but with a Linux user Interface: Cinammon, apt and all the debian stuff.
I run Mint as my main OS, but hardware compatibility is still a headache in Linux for me.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#56He is missing the point. Flatpak/Snap are not just an alternative way to ship binaries. They are way to isolate applications and what they can do. Landscape has moved from protecting the system or an user from another to protect the same user applications and their data from each other, specially for desktop environments. That is not even in the map for Windows, its security model and its applications. It is a big ju…
Windows does a lot of sandboxing in this space though what do you mean?
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#57People always talk about this “I can run a 20 year .exe file” situation but when I tell you that I have never, in 30+ years, EVER had a need to run a 20+ year executable, it just makes me go… yeah, and?
Sure I believe backwards compatibility is a nice to have feature, but I have never, nor do I think I will ever, have a need to run 20-year-old software.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. True, but sad. The way to achieve compatibility on Linux is to distribute applications in the form of what are essentially tarballs of entire Linux systems. This is the "fuck it" solution. Of course I suppose it's not unusual for Windows stuff to be st…
> to distribute applications in the form of what are essentially tarballs of entire Linux systems. No so bad when Linux ran from a floppy with 2Mb of RAM. Sadly every library just got bigger and bigger without any practical way to generate a lighter application specific version.
Also, 64-bit code and especially data are just larger, because every address is 8 bytes, and data has to be aligned on at least 4-byte boundary.
You can still have very tiny Linux with a relatively modern kernel on tiny m0 cores, and there's ELKS for 16-bit cores.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#59I want the opposite: id like a way to run the windows kernel, drivers and most low level OS stuff by windows, but with a Linux user Interface: Cinammon, apt and all the debian stuff. I run Mint as my main OS, but hardware compatibility is still a headache in Linux for me.
If you're not buying a laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported by the hardware vendor, you're going to have a hard time.
You might get lucky, but it sounds like you've not been lucky.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#60I 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…
Flatpak could work better because it already knows how to factor out common parts, so it could bring in only one (or just few) version of Wine.
Unfortunately Flathub (the biggest Flatpak repository) doesn't allow Windows apps, despite it working on a technical level