271–280 of 493 posts
I'm back to running Windows because of the shifting sands of Python and WxWindows that broke WikidPad, my personal wiki. The .exe from 2012 still works perfectly though, so I migrated back from Ubuntu to be able to use it without hassle. It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.
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Honestly, it’s probably faster and less resource intensive through emulation than your average Electron app :-/
Wine Is Not an Emulator (WINE). It provides win32 APIs; your CPU will handle the instructions natively. There is no “probably” about it.
This might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
Android makes a sport of breaking ABI compatibly and it hasn't stopped it from being the most popular mobile OS
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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…
The problem is slapping Linux on some random bit of Windows kit and expecting it to work as though it had shipped with Linux, with support to back it. The more recent, the worse it will be.
If you want to run Linux, buy Linux computers that ship with Linux and have a support number you can call. Just like you'd not expect to be able to slap OSX on some random Dell and have it work.
I'm back to running Windows because of the shifting sands of Python and WxWindows that broke WikidPad, my personal wiki. The .exe from 2012 still works perfectly though, so I migrated back from Ubuntu to be able to use it without hassle. It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.
Meanwhile, in 2025, with 64GB RAM and solid state drives, we hear, "Windows 11 Task Manager really, really shouldn't be eating up 15% of my CPU and take multiple seconds to fire up."
There is a ton of useful FOSS for Windows and maybe it is a good push to modernize abandoned projects or make Win32 projects cross-compilable.
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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…
Can you give an example where a breaking change was introduced in NT kernel ABI?
Are the people behind this project the same as the Free95 team?
googles
Ah, no, that was FreeWin95. What on earth is Free95, it feels like history repeating itself…
I'm back to running Windows because of the shifting sands of Python and WxWindows that broke WikidPad, my personal wiki. The .exe from 2012 still works perfectly though, so I migrated back from Ubuntu to be able to use it without hassle. It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.
Server 2003 was the last release supervised by Cutler, so would have my vote. It's even source-available... technically.
Source: I reviewed Cutler's lock-free data structure changes in Vista/Longhorn to find bugs in them, failed to find any.