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Convert Linux to Windows

philipbohun.com

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Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#181

Post by jchw »

First-class support for Windows applications might just become doable, if Wine continues to progress and Win32 doesn't accelerate. There were a handful of quality of life improvements in previous Windows releases, but the biggest Win32 changes feel like they happened quite a while ago by now, and for good reason: Win32 is stable and mature. It's still a moving target, but not by nearly as much, and even if Microsoft wanted to move it for the sake of moving it, they might find more resistance than they can completely overcome. For now, I think Wine is still not good enough to recommend people just use for everything, though. It's incredible, but incredible doesn't make Photoshop install.

However, I also think that we could "solve" a lot of the compatibility problems.

There are tons of old Linux binaries that don't work anymore. But... They could. A lot of old binaries, surely the vast majority, could absolutely run on a modern kernel. The problem is the userspace. The binaries themselves contain oodles of information that could be used to figure out what they need to run, it's just that there's nothing in place to try to make sure that stuff is available.

I really believe we could make it possible for a distro, out of the box, to make old binaries "just work", double-click and run. Want to install an old game from an .rpm or .deb you have? The system could identify what base OS that is and install it into it's own chroot with its dependencies, then create desktop icons for it. Execution failures? Missing libraries? Xlib errors? Let's have a graphical error message with actionable help.

Well, it could be done, anyway. If you wanted to follow the spirit of Windows here, it would be the right thing to do, and it'd help users who found a thing that says it supports "Linux" run that thing the way they would hope and expect it to run. Will it actually happen? Not unless someone makes it happen, and convinces distros, desktops and all other stakeholders it's worth shipping, then maintains and improves it going forward. It's a bit depressing when you realize that the technical part of implementing this is basically the least challenging part, at least for a proof of concept.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#182

Post by JanisErdmanis »

gmuslera wrote: post #51

He is missing the point. Flatpak/Snap are not just an alternative way to ship binaries. They are way to isolate applications and what they can do. Landscape has moved from protecting the system or an user from another to protect the same user applications and their data from each other, specially for desktop environments. That is not even in the map for Windows, its security model and its applications. It is a big ju…

The Windows MSIX also does sandboxing.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#184

Post by timewizard »

magackame wrote: post #71

What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.

> Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware?

Personal computers are for persons. They don't view their use of their own systems through the lens of an imputed purity test.

> I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.

Then don't support those who do with your dollars. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the market shows it disagrees with you.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#185

Post by squiggleblaz »

alphazard wrote: post #113

> 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.

It's not "some c library on top of them", it's glibc. You can use another libc, but that means you're going to be incompatible with the distro expectations in terms of configuration, because that's handled by glibc, so you just push off the instability to a different part of your system.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#186

Post by einpoklum »

vlovich123 wrote: post #50
devit wrote: post #5

That makes no sense: shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux, which is what flatpak/snap/appimage do. It can also be achieved with static linking and by shipping all needed library and using a shell script loader that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Also glibc (contrary to the author's false claims) and properly designed libraries are backwards compatible, so in p…

> 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…

> So everything is properly designed but somehow there's a lot of general incompetence preventing it from working.

But it is working, actually:

* If you update your distro with binaries from apt, yum, zypper etc. - they work.

* If you download statically-linked binaries - they work.

* If you download Snaps/Flatpak, they work.

> 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.

Only if you want to distribute a dynamically-linked binary without its dependencies. And even then - you have to build with a toolchain for that distro, not with that distro itself.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#187

Post by [deleted] »

sebazzz wrote: post #166
CrossVR wrote: post #152

> While the Linux syscalls themselves are very stable and reliable, the c library on top of them is not. Practically all of userland is based on libc, and therefore by proxy Linux itself has a binary compatibility problem. People who primarily use Linux often forget that Windows has the exact same problem. In the case of Windows libc is distributed as part of the Visual C++ runtime. Each version of Visual Studio has…

> The only thing Windows does better is ensuring that they maintain backwards compatibility in libc until they release a new version of Visual Studio But they are installed side-by-side, major versions at least.

[deleted]

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#188

Post by dartharva »

ndiddy wrote: post #156
dartharva wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. I have been using Linux for a decade and would want nothing more if standalone application setups like those in Windows became the norm of software distribution. Centralized package management is a curse. Apps should be responsible for their own updates, not the OS.

Great news, there's a distro called Slackware that eschews centralized package management (besides optionally delivering updates for preinstalled packages). It's been around for ~20 years before you started using Linux. If you'd like to rid yourself of the curse of centralized package management in favor of running "./configure && make && sudo make install" like a real man, you should give it a try.

Standalone app installers ≠ compiling from source

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#189

Post by teo_zero »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #157
CrossVR wrote: post #152

> While the Linux syscalls themselves are very stable and reliable, the c library on top of them is not. Practically all of userland is based on libc, and therefore by proxy Linux itself has a binary compatibility problem. People who primarily use Linux often forget that Windows has the exact same problem. In the case of Windows libc is distributed as part of the Visual C++ runtime. Each version of Visual Studio has…

In Winapi land, the equivalent of "the c library" is NTDLL,its wrappers and other supporting libs (advapi32,userenv,etc... and Win32 specific libs which I consider equivalent to X11 libs). MSVCR in my opinion is there to provide the stdlib for C/C++ programs. In Linux land, the library that provides the C stdlib also wraps syscalls, in Windows, the C stdlib is a wrapper/interface for Windows api's. My opinion is that…

Very well explained, thank you.

> Let Linux be Linux and Windows be Windows. They're both great if you appreciate them for what they are and use the accordingly.

What if you technically prefer the Windows way, but are worried about Microsoft's behavior related to commercial strategy, lock-down, privacy...?

The author envisions a system that's technically stable as Windows, yet free as Linux.

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