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Convert Linux to Windows

philipbohun.com

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Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#221

Post by jillesvangurp »

shmerl wrote: post #96

By the way, Wine is more stable than Windows itself in supporting older Windows ABIs. Someone should develop an analog for Linux itself. I.e. support for older / historic ABIs that would be translated into whatever modern Linux has. Some isolated example of that is SDL 1.x translated to SDL 2. Wine itself already exists, you don't need to develop any new distro for running Windows programs on Linux. Just improve Wine…

Exactly, wine is all that's needed here for windows stuff. And we have snap, flatpak, docker, and a few other things for Linux stuff.

We'll probably get a bit of irony in a few years when somebody at MS realizes that they can just use wine on top of their Linux emulation layer to run any old MS legacy software from the past three decades+ and then cleans up the rest of windows to not have any support for legacy APIs. Because having that is redundant. Emulators are great. There's no need to run ancient software natively.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#223

Post by DeathArrow »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #192
okanat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should fund ReactOS for end-user applications. Win32 is well established and isn't going anywhere. So why not take advantage of Microsoft's API design effort

But who is "we"? It might have been valuable to games makers, but Wine/Linux based systems seems to be adequate for them. So who is left?

>So who is left?

People who like and need Windows apps, people who want to have an out of the box experience when running those apps, people who don't like the loss of performance when using Wine, people who generally like Windows but want to have an alternative in case that dislike where Microsoft is heading with Windows development.

That is a lot of people, me included. But since Windows experience is somehow still tolerable, there aren't many willing to invest time or money into ReactOS. There are no corporate sponsors since you don't make money from desktop OS-es unless you use them to sell expensive hardware like Apple did.

Someone like Valve could have sponsored it but they though they can reach their goals with Wine while spending much less money.

Another sponsor for ReactOS can be a state actor like China or EU, somebody with deep pockets who wants and needs to run Windows software but don't want their desktop to be under US control.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#224

Post by DeathArrow »

bentt wrote: post #81

This is a wonderful idea and could succeed if the creator could rally the right devs and users. What it really needs is Ubuntu tier branding and UX work. This has been a rarity in the Linux desktop space. I am hopeful SteamOS will bring us something very similar.

>What it really needs is Ubuntu tier branding and UX work.

That means somebody paying for the work. Designers and UX specialists don't care about free work like many programmers do.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#225

Post by DeathArrow »

James_K wrote: post #88

Java already solved this problem, for the most part. This whole ABI nonsense really grinds my gears. It's essentially just a result of the silly decision to compile software into dubious blobs and ship those to users. You could get rid of an awful lot of malware and massively simplify software distribution if you were to distribute a platform agnostic intermediary representation of source code that preserves enough s…

Why Libre Office takes much more time to start than MS Office? Why does it feel sluggish?

At least you didn't propose to write everything in Javascript.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#226

Post by DeathArrow »

xtracto wrote: post #55

I want the opposite: id like a way to run the windows kernel, drivers and most low level OS stuff by windows, but with a Linux user Interface: Cinammon, apt and all the debian stuff. I run Mint as my main OS, but hardware compatibility is still a headache in Linux for me.

Doesn't WSL do that?

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#227

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

Windows toolchain (even gnu) just provides old libraries to link with. This should work the same on linux, and AFAIK zig does just that.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#229

Post by coderenegade »

DeathArrow wrote: post #205
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…

>I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine I think the idea is to provide a seamless Windows like experience so the user works exact how he expects to work under Windows. Without having to fiddle, modify configurations, wrestle with different settings. Just click and run.

Yes, which is what I mentioned in the rest of the post. You could distribute a container that has wine in it, with just the configuration necessary to get the software working in the container. It would be straightforward to write a thin abstraction layer that pulls the container (installation) and gives you an executable that you can double click on and launch.

An end user wouldn't need to modify configs or wrestle settings, because that's already done for you upstream. You just get an artifact that you can click and run. From the other posts, Proton and Steam Deck already do something similar, and this is also conceptually similar to the way AppImages, Flatpaks etc. work.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#230

Post by lvturner »

tex0 wrote: post #222

That is pretty much what I'm doing with Steam, Proton and my Game Library. 99% the time it works just great.

Sadly a few sim racing games don't run at all and VR is a bit hit and miss (though the Quest3 with either WiVRN or ALVR seems to work well)

Still I'd rather this than deal with daily driving Windows! I'm amazed at how good Gaming on Linux has gotten over the past few years.

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