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

Convert Linux to Windows

philipbohun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 459 posts

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#111

Post by icedchai »

okanat wrote: post #101
icedchai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same about container images for server apps. (Packaging is hard.)

If Linux userspace had libraries with stable ABI, you could just tar or zip binaries and they would work. You wouldn't need to bundle system layer. This is how you deploy server apps on Windows Server systems. You just unpack and they work. It is not a packaging problem. It is a system design problem. Linux ecosystem simply isn't nice for binary distribution except the kernel, mostly.

Linux feels a bit different since the complete system is not controlled by a single vendor. You have multiple distributions with their own kernel versions, libc versions, library dependencies, etc.

Mac OS has solved this but that is obviously a single vendor. FreeBSD has decent backwards compatibility (through the -compat packages), but that is also a single vendor.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#112

Post by vlovich123 »

skissane wrote: post #62
vlovich123 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also glibc (contrary to the author's false claims) and properly designed libraries are backwards compatible, so in principle just adding the debs/rpms from an older Debian/Fedora that ships the needed libraries to the packaging repositories and running apt/dnf should work in theory, although unfortunately might not in practice due to the general incompetence of programmers and distribution maintainers. Got it. So e…

> And while glibc is backward compatible & that generally does work, glibc is NOT forward compatible which is a huge problem - it means that you have to build on the oldest bistro you can find so that the built binaries actually work on arbitrary machines you try to run it on. Isn’t this easily solved by building in a container? Something a lot of people do anyway - I do it all the time because it insulates the build…

Umm... that doesn't isolate you in any meaningful way because you're surrounding OS is still the container with a base image from Linux years ago?

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#113

Post by alphazard »

> While the Linux syscalls themselves are very stable and reliable, the c library on top of them is not.

Maybe just don't use that library then? Or don't do that ridiculous thing where you fumble around at runtime desperately looking for executable pages that should just be included in your binary.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#114

Post by coderenegade »

immibis wrote: post #43
coderenegade wrote: post #35

I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…

If you change a lot of things about a Linux system, then you're making a new distro. Half of this incompatibility is because Linux is flexible, anyway. My system is different from your system, and did anyone test on both? If you want a more stable ABI then you need a more stable system.

You wouldn't have to change anything about the underlying system, which is the point. Containers work the same regardless of the underlying system, so they get around the various differences in everyone's individual machine. I use identical containers routinely on Fedora and Ubuntu systems at home without any issue, and I produce containers for RHEL and various other systems at work. Half the point of containers is eliminating the variability between dev systems and deployment.

Rather than everyone having to get the software working on their machine, you would get it working once in the container, and then just distribute that.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#115

Post by okanat »

icedchai wrote: post #111
okanat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Linux userspace had libraries with stable ABI, you could just tar or zip binaries and they would work. You wouldn't need to bundle system layer. This is how you deploy server apps on Windows Server systems. You just unpack and they work. It is not a packaging problem. It is a system design problem. Linux ecosystem simply isn't nice for binary distribution except the kernel, mostly.

Linux feels a bit different since the complete system is not controlled by a single vendor. You have multiple distributions with their own kernel versions, libc versions, library dependencies, etc. Mac OS has solved this but that is obviously a single vendor. FreeBSD has decent backwards compatibility (through the -compat packages), but that is also a single vendor.

Yep, having a single supplier of the system layer usually ends up with better backwards compatibility for binary distribution.

That's also why I have the opinion that the world is worse off due to the fact that Linux "won" Unix wars.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#116

Post by [deleted] »

II2II wrote: post #74

Ask IBM how well that idea worked. I think it's fair to say that OS/2 had better Windows compatibility (for it's era) than Wine offers (in this era). The problem was that Microsoft introduced breaking changes with the introduction of Windows 95. While old Windows applications would continue to run under OS/2, IBM felt that it would take too much effort to introduce a compatability layer for Windows 95. If I recall co…

[deleted]

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#117

Post by coderenegade »

trelane wrote: post #46
coderenegade wrote: post #35

I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…

The concept of containers for Windows applications running in WINE is called "bottles." https://support.codeweavers.com/en_US/2-getting-started/2-in... I believe it started with Cedega, but I could be wrong. That's where I first recall encountering it.

TIL. I'm gonna check this out. It's good to see that people are already working on this, because it's one of those things that, to me, just makes a lot of sense. You'd think that with the all of the layers of abstraction we have nowadays, it should be possible to run software on any underlying system in an ergonomic fashion, even if it's not necessarily efficient.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#118

Post by coderenegade »

win32lover wrote: post #47
coderenegade wrote: post #35

I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…

At this point nobody is going to learn a new system. People already know how to write and package exes which is the whole point. > but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa I think a lot of these problems could be avoided with a singular OS with the sole goal to support windows exes.

It's possible to use docker as a package manager. I worked jobs where did exactly that, because we needed to compile certain dependencies for our application, and it streamlined the whole process.

There's zero reason you couldn't create a small abstraction layer around docker so you can install "executables" that are really just launching within a container. I mean, isn't that the whole idea behind flatpak, snaps, and appimages?

The point is to leverage modern abstraction techniques so that people don't need to learn a new system.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#119

Post by vagab0nd »

pdonis wrote: post #68

To the extent binary distribution is "unstable" on Linux, it's because users aren't expected to just download random binaries from wherever, as is normal on Windows (and Mac, for that matter). Users are expected to either obtain binaries from their distro, or compile them from source. In either case, all of the issues about binary distribution being "unstable" are invisible to users. Which is the point. People who wa…

Exactly this. In fact, what's a distro if not basically a well-maintained app directory?

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#120

Post by LeFantome »

coderenegade wrote: post #35

I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…

You could distribute Wine as a Flatpak platform. Flatpaks are already containers that run the same on all distros. Making a Win32 base that works in this same way using the same tooling would not be difficult.
Post reply on HN