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Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

loss32.org

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Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#71

Post by r_lee »

hypeatei wrote: post #49
lelele wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?

Yes. Enterprise, Pro, and Home are the enshittified, retail editions. Enterprise just adds a few more features IIRC but still has ads. The other versions I mentioned above don't have any of that.

Enterprise is not retail and is usually done via volume licensing, but probably without any additional configuration it might have that stuff intact.

But you can use group policy etc. freely. I don't know how Win 11 is though

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#72

Post by tubs »

shakna wrote: post #69
andsoitis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows What are some examples?

Anything around DirectX 10 and older has issues with Windows, these days. One more popular example is Grid 2, another is Morrowind. Both crash on launch, unless you tweak a lot of things, and even then it won't always succeed. Need for Speed II: SE is "platinum" on Wine, and pretty much unable to be run at all on Windows 11.

Isn’t this because the wine db has those tweaks pre configured?

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#73

Post by mikkupikku »

wffurr wrote: post #68
Verdex wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience. Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult. Everything just works on L…

>> some sound issues Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?

In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't get through any native application, nor some games run with proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio fidelity.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#74

Post by ndiddy »

jeremyjh wrote: post #53
andy_ppp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it’s probably faster and less resource intensive through emulation than your average Electron app :-/

Wine Is Not an Emulator (WINE). It provides win32 APIs; your CPU will handle the instructions natively. There is no “probably” about it.

Whenever people bring this up I find it somewhat silly. Wine originally stood for "Windows Emulator". See old release notes ( https://lwn.net/1998/1112/wine981108.html ) for one example: "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator." The name change was made for trademark and marketing reasons. The maintainers were concerned that if the project got good enough to frighten Microsoft, they might get sued for having "Windows" in the name. They also had to deal with confusion from people such as yourself who thought "emulation" automatically meant "software-based, interpreted emulation" and therefore that running stuff in Wine must have some significant performance penalty. Other Windows compatibility solutions like SoftWindows and Virtual PC used interpreted emulation and were slow as a result, so the Wine maintainers wanted to emphasize that Wine could run software just as quickly as the same computer running Windows.

Emulation does not mean that the CPU must be interpreted. For example, the DOSEMU emulator for Linux from the early 90s ran DOS programs natively using the 386's virtual 8086 mode, and reimplemented the DOS API. This worked similarly to Microsoft's Virtual DOS Machine on Windows NT. For a more recent example, the ShadPS4 PS4 emulator runs the game code natively on your amd64 CPU and reimplements the PS4 API in the emulator source code for graphics/audio/input/etc calls.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#75

Post by mikkupikku »

Ygg2 wrote: post #24
oybng wrote: post #15

It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away

It's functional - yes, intuitive - maybe, but optimized is highly debatable. The answer to maintaining a highly functional and stable OS is piles and piles of backwards compatibility misery on the devs. You want Windows 9? Sorry, some code checks the string for Windows 9 to determine if the OS is Windows 95 or 98.

Millions of total computer noobs hit the ground running with Windows 95. It was a great achievement in software design.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#76

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

andsoitis wrote: post #61
rickcarlino wrote: post #7

Building GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web technologies might actually be more stable and productive.

I would pick Delphi (with which you can build Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS apps - https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi ) Alternatively, RemObjects makes Elements, also a RAD programming environment in which you can code in Oxygene (their Object Pascal), C#, Swift, Java, Go, or Mercury (VB) and target all platforms: .Net, iOS and macOS, Android, WebAssemblyl, Java, Linux, Windows.

> Alternatively, RemObjects makes Elements, also a RAD programming environment in which you can code in Oxygene (their Object Pascal), C#, Swift, Java, Go, or Mercury (VB) and target all platforms: .Net, iOS and macOS, Android, WebAssemblyl, Java, Linux, Windows.

Wait you can make Android applications with Golang without too much sorcery??

I just wanted to convert some Golang CLI applications to GUI's for Android and I instead ended up giving up on the project and just started recommending people to use termux.

Please tell me if there is a simple method for Golang which can "just work" for basically being the Visualbasic-alike glue code to just glue CLI and GUI mostly.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#77

Post by bmicraft »

wffurr wrote: post #68
Verdex wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience. Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult. Everything just works on L…

>> some sound issues Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?

To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#78

Post by jlarocco »

bobajeff wrote: post #60
rickcarlino wrote: post #7

Building GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web technologies might actually be more stable and productive.

Only if I don't need to do anything beyond the built-in widgets and effects of Win32. If I need to do anything beyond that then I don't see me being more productive than if I were using a mature, well documented and actively maintained application runtime like the Web.

That's not really true. Even in the 90s there were large libraries of 3rd party widgets available for Windows that could be drag-and-dropped into VB, Delphi, and even the Visual C++ UI editor. For tasks running the gamut from 3D graphics to interfacing with custom hardware.

The web was a big step backwards for UI design. It was a 30 year detour whose results still suck compared to pre-web UIs.

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#79

Post by ori_b »

senfiaj wrote: post #50

This might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s

To quote a friend; "Glibc is a waste of a perfectly good stable kernel ABI"

Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

#80

Post by zppln »

hypeatei wrote: post #18
oybng wrote: post #15

It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away

It still is if you're an enterprise customer. The retail users aren't Microsoft's cash cows, so they get ads and BS in their editions. The underlying APIs are still stable and MS provides the LTSC & Server editions to businesses which lack all that retail cruft.

I'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as right-clicking a slow operation.

I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.

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