141–150 of 493 posts
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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.
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It's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30 years and has excellent compatibility at this point.
5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not excellent compatibility.
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Linux didn't aim to be an OS in the consumer sense (it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific literature OS == kernel, nothing else).The "consumer" OS is GNU/Linux or Android/Linux.
There really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system, proportionately.
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…
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>> some sound issues Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?
Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts. As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem. It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.
It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away
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That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source. Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.
So every Linux distribution should compile and distribute packages for every single piece of open source software in existence , both the very newest stuff that was only released last week, and also everything from 30+ years ago, no matter how obscure. Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.
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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?
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
AppImage, theoretically, solves this problem (or FlatPak I guess). The issue would really be in getting people to package up dead/abandoned software.
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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?