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

BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

virtuallyfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 115 posts

Re: BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

#31

Post by Dalewyn »

doublerabbit wrote: post #5
ianai wrote: post #2

Talk about things I’d want to bring back if I were suddenly a mega millionaire or billionaire.

This is where we should be, native support of Linux on Windows and native support of Windows on Linux. Executables should be cross-compatible, we somehow ended up in a reality of monopolistic -- 1v1. I would enjoy it to break free at some point but I doubt it. Just about everything now is it's own garden with a tiny API gate to allow you access to the minor features of the whole collection. I am aware of WSL and the…

As mentioned in a thread yesterday (and justifiably memed often in general)[1], Win32 is the most stable environment to target in Linux.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585729

Re: BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

#32

Post by partomniscient »

doublerabbit wrote: post #5
ianai wrote: post #2

Talk about things I’d want to bring back if I were suddenly a mega millionaire or billionaire.

This is where we should be, native support of Linux on Windows and native support of Windows on Linux. Executables should be cross-compatible, we somehow ended up in a reality of monopolistic -- 1v1. I would enjoy it to break free at some point but I doubt it. Just about everything now is it's own garden with a tiny API gate to allow you access to the minor features of the whole collection. I am aware of WSL and the…

But they should all break on MacOS and refuse to be cross-compiled for Windows/Linux?

I agree with your idealism, but I think the best we're going to get is more or less what we have now, otherwise we end up in the space where program x works with o/s y version z subsystem q, but not the other combinations you'd hope for.

I'm still annoyed that we don't design enough for the future that when a new O/S version/architecture gets released there isn't more effort to save the past. We have a perfectly serviceable relatively recent printer (4-5 years old?) that my wife now can't use because her new Mac which replaced her 12 year old mac, now doesn't have a driver for it, because there are no Sonoma versions of it.

I think we err on the wrong side of creating waste at the expense of not doing (admittedly annoying) work.

To get back on topic, this was the point of subsytems - you managed to hold onto and get access to the past you liked from within your walled garden.

Re: BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

#34

Post by exikyut »

scruffyherder wrote: post #11
wkat4242 wrote: post #8

Another interesting thing to explore would be colinux which was a bit similar to WSL but third party.

probably too mainstream, there was other hacked ways of running linux on windows using debuggers and other memory map hacks...

I honestly wouldn't mind learning what these looked like! I wasn't really aware of the long tail of the scene back in the day.

Re: BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

#35

Post by ianai »

frutiger wrote: post #16
scruffyherder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really, the exe's are a.out so it's more like EMX. It's broken up like services more like HURD, and extended to 32bit on Win16. It's far more cooler being able to run on Windows 3.1

Sure, but from a user perspective? It says you could run vi/gcc/etc. in BoW, which you can easily do. I don't know why GGP would want to spend millions (surely would cost way more than millions) nor billions recreating something that already exists?

Really, to do something different and that might move the needle to new possibilities. The *BSDs and Linux seem like they permanently miss just a few core elements to be mass adoptable. Mass adoption would benefit everyone through things like competition but also just different features. Like imagine being able to zfs send incremental backups of your daily drivers and gaming boxes. Or if plan9 had really taken off and had real market share. Idk, just feels like we've been stuck in a place for the last few decades.
Post reply on HN