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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

#111
This is going to be a bold claim but here goes.

This will never work, because it isn't a radical enough departure from Linux.

Linux occupies the bottom of a well in the cartesian space. Any deviation is an uphill battle. You'll die trying to reach escape velocity.

The forcing factors that pull you back down:

1. Battles-testedness. The mainstream Linux distros just have more eyeballs on them. That means your WINE-first distro (which I'll call "Lindows" in honor of the dead OS from 2003) will have bugs that make people consider abandoning the dream and going back to Gnome Fedora.

2. Cool factor. Nobody wants to open up their riced-out Linux laptop in class and have their classmate look over and go "yo this n** running windows 85!" (So, you're going to have to port XMonad to WINE. I don't make the rules!)

3. Kernel churn. People will want to run this thing on their brand-new gaming laptop. That likely means they'll need a recent kernel. And while they "never break userspace" in theory, in practice you'll need a new set of drivers and MESA and other add-ons that WILL breaks things. Especially things like 3D apps running through WINE (not to mention audio). Google can throw engineers at the problem of keeping Chromium working across graphics stacks. But can you?

If you could plant your flag in the dirt and say "we fork here" and make a radical left turn from mainline Linux, and get a cohort of kernel devs and app developers to follow you, you'd have a chance.

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

#112
post #68
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?

Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some systems.

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

#113
post #12

> What is this? A dream of a Linux distribution where the entire desktop environment is Win32 software running under WINE. I might unironically use this. The Windows 2000 era desktop was light and practical. I wonder how well it performs with modern high-resolution, high-dpi displays.

Xfce already exists and has less impedance mismatch. It’s almost as good in some ways, probably better in a few tiny ones.

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

#114
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

Piracy. The consumer versions are filled with ads because most people don't pay for them.

If you were able to wave a magic wand today and remove piracy, Microsoft would not remove ads.

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads, it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly features, that are still present in enterprise versions.

Start menu search requires 7 web browser processes that consume ~350 MB of RAM to be constantly running.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.

Windows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler was fully in charge of Windows.

Things started going downhill after that.

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

#118
post #94
post #90

Can somebody explain: 1. The exact problem with the Linux ABI 2. What causes it (the issues that makes it such a challenge) 3. How it changed over the years, and its current state 4. Any serious attempts to resolve it I've been on Linux for may be 2 decades at this point. I haven't noticed any issues with ABI so far, perhaps because I use everything from the distro repo or build and install them using the package man…

You never ran into a GLIBC version problem?

Wasn't there also DLL hell on Windows?

My understanding is that very old statically linked Linux images still run today because paraphrasing Linus: "we don't break user space".

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

#119
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.

https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

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

#120
post #67
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

I agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the latest Mint or Ubuntu distros. Stuff that worked before just breaks, especially if the app isn’t in the repo.

Yes and even the package format thing is a hell of its own. Even on Ubuntu you have multiple package formats and sometimes there are even multiple app stores (a Gnome one and an Ubuntu specific if I remember correctly)
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