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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

#231

Post by trelane »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #159

Someone please create a windows 7 like user interface or even XP like interface too and you got yourself a serious fan I might seriously recommend it to newbies and like there is just this love I have for windows 7 even though I really didn't use it for much but its so much more elegant in its own way than windows 10 like it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.

> it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.

It would fail, and just be another corpse in the desktop OS graveyard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius

https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

Unless you ship your own hardware or get a vendor to ship your OS (see the above), and set up so the user can actually use it, you have to get users to install it on Windows hardware. So now your company is debugging broken consumer hardware without the help of the OEM. So that hopefully someone will install it on exactly that configuration for free.

This is not a winning business model.

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

#232

Post by Rohansi »

kccqzy wrote: post #228
rep_lodsb wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged.

Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed.

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

#233

Post by Ygg2 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #63
Ygg2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He was talking about user interface not app compatibility

He's mentioning Desktop environment, I assume he means all the parts, not just UI.

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

#234

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

trelane wrote: post #231
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #159

Someone please create a windows 7 like user interface or even XP like interface too and you got yourself a serious fan I might seriously recommend it to newbies and like there is just this love I have for windows 7 even though I really didn't use it for much but its so much more elegant in its own way than windows 10 like it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.

> it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out. It would fail, and just be another corpse in the desktop OS graveyard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire Unless you ship your own hardware or get a vendor to ship your OS (see the above), and set up so the us…

Hm I see the confusion, what I was proposed was for something like loss32 to have a window manager / desktop environmnet which looks like windows 7

Loss32 is itself a linux distro and thus there should technically be nothing stopping it from shipping everywhere

I think you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel from scratch or something but I am just merely asking a loss32 reskin which looks like windows 7 which is definitely possible without any of the company debugging consumer hardware or even the need of company for that matter I suppose considering that I was proposing an open source desktop environment which just behaved like windows 7 by default as an example.

I don't really understand why we need a winning business model out of it, there isn't really a winning model for niri,hyprland,sway,kde,xfce,lxqt,gnome etc., they are all open source projects who are run with help of donations

There might be a misunderstanding between us but I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.

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

#235

Post by Zen1th »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #159

Someone please create a windows 7 like user interface or even XP like interface too and you got yourself a serious fan I might seriously recommend it to newbies and like there is just this love I have for windows 7 even though I really didn't use it for much but its so much more elegant in its own way than windows 10 like it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.

You should try KDE with https://github.com/ivvil/aerothemeplasma

The screenshots could easily fool me into believing it actually is Windows 7 :p

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

#237

Post by nine_k »

josephg wrote: post #200
ndiddy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all. It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so…

This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific to your particular sound chip / card.

Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.

Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter, but not empty.

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

#238

Post by chungy »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #185
dardeaup wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can build cross-platform GUI apps with Delphi. However, that requires using Firemonkey (FMX). If you build a GUI app using VCL on Delphi, it's limited to Windows. If you build an app with Lazarus and LCL, you CAN have it work cross-platform.

I thought the point was that Windows apps will run on Linux under Wine (and macOS?) so using VCL is a cross-platform GUI development environment.

You might as well use Lazarus and LCL. It'll give the best of all worlds.

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

#239

Post by pseudony »

I think this project actually has merit and highlights the core issue.

We have gone through one perceived reason after the other to try and explain why the year of the Linux desktop wasn’t this one.

Uncharitably, Linux is too busy breaking and deprecating itself to ever become more than a server OS, and that only works due to companies sponsoring most the testing and code that makes those parts work. Desktop in all its forms is an unmitigated shit show.

With linux, you’re always one kernel/systemd/$sound system/desktop upgrade away from a broken system.

Personal pains: nvidia drivers, oss->alsa, alsa->pulse audio, pulse audio->pipe wire, init.d to upstart to systemd, anything dkms ever, bash to dash, gtk2 to gtk3, kde3 to kde4 (basically a decade?), gnome 2 to gnome 3, some 10 gnome 3 releases breaking plugins I relied on.

It should be blindingly obvious; windows can shove ads everywhere from the tray bar to start menu and even the damned lock screen, on enterprise editions no less, and STILL have users. This should tell you that linux is missing something.

It’s not the install barrier (it’s never been lower, corporate IT could issue linux laptops, linux on laptops exist from several vendors).

It’s also not software, the world has never placed so many core apps in the browser (even office, these days).

It’s not gaming. Though its telling that, in the end, the solution from valve (proton) incidentally solves two issues - porting (stable) windows APIs to linux and packaging a complete mini-linux because we can’t interoperate between distros or even releases of the same distro.

I think the complete and utter disdain in linux for stability from libraries through subsystems to desktop servers, ui toolkits and the very desktops themselves is the core problem. And solving through package management and the ensuing fragmentation from distros a close second.

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

#240

Post by chungy »

vips7L wrote: post #108
Etheryte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was sufficient interest in it, most performance issues could be solved. Look at Python or Javascript, big companies have financial interest in it so they've poured an insane amount of capital into making them faster.

Isn’t python still the slowest mainstream language?

No. Ruby exists.
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