Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

Yes, so that's why freezing the glibc symbol versions would help. If everybody uses the same version, you cannot get conflicts (at least after it has rippled through and everybody is on the same version). The downside is that we can't add anything new to glibc, but I'd say given all the trouble it produces, that's worth accepting. We can still add bugfixes and security fixes to glibc, we just don't change the APIs of the symbols.

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> At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into a zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages today).

Looks like you met the right guy because I have built this tool :)

Allow me to show my project, Appseed (https://nanotimestamps.org/appseed): It's a simple fish script which I had (prototyped with Claude) some 8-10 months ago I guess to solve exactly this.

I have a youtube video in the website and the repository is open source on github too.

So this actually worked fantastic for a lot of different binaries that I tested it on and I had uploaded it on hackernews as well but nobody really responded, perhaps this might change it :p

Now what appseed does is that you can think of it is that it can take a binary and convert it into two folders (one is the dynamic library part) and the other is the binary itself

So you can then use something like tar to package it up and run it anywhere. I can of course create it into a single elf-64 as well but I wanted to make it more flexible so that we can have more dynamic library like or perhaps caching or just some other ideas and this made things simple for me too

Ldshim is really good idea too although I think I am unable to understand it for the time being but I will try to understand it I suppose. I would really appreciate it if you can tell me more about Ldshim! Perhaps take a look at Appseed too and I think that there might be some similarities except I tried to just create a fish script which can just convert any dynamic binary usually into a static one of sorts

I just want more people to take ideas like appseed or zapp's and run with it to make linux's ecosystem better man. Because I just prototyped it with LLM's to see if it was possible or not since I don't have much expertise in the area. So I can only imagine what can be possible if people who have expertise do something about it and this was why I shared it originally/created it I guess.

Let me know if you are interested in discussing anything about appseed. My memory's a little rusty about how it worked but I would love to talk about it if I can be of any help :p

Have a nice new year man! :p

> Kind of funny to realize, the NT kernel ABI isn’t even all that stable itself

This is not a big problem if it's hard/unlikely enough to write a code that accidentally relies on raw syscalls. At least MS's dev tooling doesn't provide an easy way to bypass the standard DLLs.

> makes me wonder how exactly Windows containers work

I guess containers do the syscalls through the standard Windows DLLs like any regular userspace application. If it's a Linux container on Windows, probably the WSL syscalls, which I guess, are stable.

I 100% agree with your comment.

Pro tip but if someone wants to create their own iso as well, they can probably just customize things imperatively in MxLinux even by just booting them up in your ram and then they have the magnificient option of basically snapshotting it and converting that into an iso so its definitely possible to create an iso tweaked down to your configuration without any hassle (trust me but its the best way to create iso's without too much hassle and if one wants hassle, nix or bootc seems to be the way to go)

Regarding Why it wouldn't hit. I don't know, I already build some of my own iso's and I can build one for windows (on MxLinux principle) and upload it for free on huggingface perhaps but the idea is of mass appeal

Yes I can do that but I would prefer if there was an iso which could just do that and I could share it with a new person in linux. And yes I could have the new person do the changes themselves but (why?), there really is no reason perhaps imo and this just feels like a low hanging fruit which nobody touched perhaps and so this is why I was curious too.

But also as the other comment pointed out, I feel like sure we can do this thing, but that there is definitely a genuine reason why we can probably create this thing itself as well and they give some good reasons as well and I agree with them overall too.

Like if you ask me, it would be fun to have more options especially considering this is linux where freedom is celebrated :p