Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

loss32.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 493 posts

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

#251

Post by uecker »

goku12 wrote: 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…

There is no ABI problem. The problem is a lack of standardization for important APIs and infrastructure. There once was a serious effort to solve this: the Linux Standard Base: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base Standardization would of course be the only way to fix this, instead of inventing even more packaging formats which fragment the ecosystem even more. LSB died due to lack of interest. I assume also because various industrial stakeholders are more interest in gaining a little bit of control over the ecosystem than in the overall success of Linux on the desktop. The other major problem is that it is no fun to maintain software, which leads to what was described as CADT: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html As you see with Wayland and Rust rewrites CADT still continues today always justified with some bullshit arguments why the rewrites are really necessary.

Together this means that basically nobody implements applications anymore. For commercial applications that market is too fragmented and it is too much effort. Open-source applications need time to grow and if all the underpinnings get changed all the time, this is too frustrating. Only a few projects survive this, and even those struggle. For example GIMP took a decade to be ported from GTK 2 to 3.

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

#252

Post by easton »

derefr wrote: post #174
ori_b wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kind of funny to realize, the NT kernel ABI isn’t even all that stable itself; it is just wrapped in a set of very stable userland exposures (Win32, UWP, etc.), and it’s those exposures that Windows executables are relying on. A theoretical Windows PE binary that was 100% statically linked (and so directly contained NT syscalls) wouldn’t be at-all portable between different Windows versions. Linux with glibc is the c…

IIRC, Windows containers require that the container be built with a base image that matches the host for it to work at all (like, the exact build of Windows has to match). Guessing that’s how they get a ‘stable ABI’.

…actually, looks like it’s a bit looser these days. Version matrix incoming: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...

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

#253

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

jcelerier wrote: post #51
antirez wrote: post #41

The difference between Win32 and Linux is that the latter didn't realize an operating system is more than a kernel and a number of libraries and systems glued together, but is, indeed, a stable ABI (even for kernel modules -- so old drivers will be usable forever), a default, unique and stable API for user interface, audio, ..., and so forth. Linux failed completely not technologically, but to understand what an OS i…

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.

> it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific literature OS == kernel, nothing else

No, the academic literature makes the difference between the kernel and the OS as a whole. The OS is meant to provide hardware abstractions to both developers and the user. The Linux world shrugged and said 'okay, this is just the kernel for us, everyone else be damned'. In this view Linux is the complete outlier, because every other commercial OS comes with a full suite of user-mode libraries and applications.

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

#254

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

trelane wrote: post #245
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think fundamentally I disagree with your optimism. I've seen a number of these come and go over the decades. I do not think making something that looks like Windows would be sufficient to be successful. > you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel from scratch or something No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is already a monumental challenge.

Agreed but there have been some real strides in innovation recently in linux, definitely worth checking out :)

Regarding successful, well they already are, ZorinOS is an OS which looks like windows 7 or has some similarities to it and its sort of recommended to beginners but usually linux mate is the most recommended distro

> No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is already a monumental challenge.

Not sure about this but I ran linux in 15 year old dell mini like its no big deal so I can only assume that support has been better but I feel like I can assure you that linux support is really good for most laptops in my observation.

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

#255

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Zen1th wrote: post #235
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

Damn you got me. I am not a big fan of KDE (Currently using Niri) but I can try to use KDE+aerothemeplasma with nixos as a dual boot (I already used to have KDE nix as dualboot until I accidentally removed that disk and ended up using the glorious tool testdisk to save that) so I will try it some day thank you!

There is also anduinos which I think doesn't try to replicate windows 7 but it definitely tries to look at windows 10 perhaps 11 iirc

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

#256

Post by dardeaup »

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.

I made the clarification because the comment I replied to mentioned Android, iOS, and macOS. There are many who used Delphi before FMX appeared and I thought it would be helpful to point out that VCL only makes Windows executables.

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

#257

Post by dontlaugh »

graemep wrote: post #216
dontlaugh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Gnome/Linux or KDE/Linux would make a lot more sense.

Except that it can be both and more: you can have Gnome, KDE, and other DEs and libraries installed and use app based on all of them simultaneously.

Sure, although every distro has a default.

systemd/Linux maybe? Lots of things are more significant than GNU, either way.

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

#258

Post by m01 »

keyringlight wrote: post #37
ezoe wrote: post #6

But would you want to run these Win32 software on Linux for daily use? I don't.

Depends on what task you're doing, and to a certain extent how you prefer to do it. For example sure there's plenty of ways to tag/rename media files, but I've yet to find something that matches the power of Mp3tag in a GUI under linux.

Have you tried kid3 (https://kid3.kde.org)? It has both a GUI and a CLI.

From a quick glance at the feature lists it looks quite comparable.

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

#259

Post by xobs »

mikkupikku wrote: post #73
wffurr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating. This is usually due to an underrun from the game requesting an audio quantum that’s too low.

The fix is:

    mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d && echo "context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum = 1024}" | tee ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf
Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.
Post reply on HN