Wine on top of X / Wayland isn't good enough. It needs to be Wine (or loss32) directly on top of the Linux kernel, started as an init.
Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
401–410 of 493 posts
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source. Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.
So every Linux distribution should compile and distribute packages for every single piece of open source software in existence , both the very newest stuff that was only released last week, and also everything from 30+ years ago, no matter how obscure. Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.
That's Guix.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols you need, and then your binary will actually work everywhere(*). * Except for non-glibc distributions of course.
I don’t understand why this is the case, and would like to understand. If I want only functions f1 and f2 which were introduced in glibc versions v1 and v2, why do I have to build with v2 rather than v3? Shouldn’t the symbols be named something like glibc_v1_f1 and glibc_v2_f2 regardless of whether you’re compiling against glibc v2 or glibc v3? If it is instead something like “compiling against vN uses symbols glibc_…
> why would it be that way?
It allows (among other things) the glibc developers to change struct layouts while remaining backwards compatible. E.g. if function f1 takes a struct as argument, and its layout changes between v2 and v3, then glibc_v2_f1 and glibc_v3_f1 have different ABIs.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
And have an ever decreasing market share, in desktop, hypervisor and server space. The API/ABI stability is probably the only thing stemming the customer leakage at all. It's not the be all and end all.
Decreasing market share in the desktop ?
Yes, but Windows is even so bad, it's been decreasing market share of desktops.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed.
That's not my point. My point is that if executable A depends on library B, and library B does not provide any stable ABI, then the package manager will take care of updating A whenever updating B. Windows has fanatical commitment to ABI stability, so the situation above does not even occur. As a user, all the hard work dealing with ABI breakages on Linux are done by the people managing the software repos, not by the…
Actually the solution to this on Windows is for programs to package all their dependencies except for Windows. When you install a game, that game includes a copy of every library the game uses, except for Windows
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if it's the right solution but it's a description of what happens right now in practice yes.
It also makes support more or less impossible. Even if we ship as source, even if the user has the skills to build it, even if the make file supports every version of the kernel, plus all other material variety, plus who knows how many dependencies, what exactly am I supposed to do when a user reports; "I followed your instructions and it doesn't run". Linux Desktop fails because it's not 1 thing, it's 100 things. An…
And being 100 things is completely unavoidable when freedom is involved. You can force everyone to use the same 1 thing, if you make it proprietary. If people have freedom to customize it, of course another 99 people will come along and do that. We should probably just accept this is the price of freedom. It's not as bad as it seems because you also have the freedom to make your system present like some other system in order to run programs made for that system.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols you need, and then your binary will actually work everywhere(*). * Except for non-glibc distributions of course.
But to link against an old glibc version, you need to compile on an old distro, on a VM. And you'll have a rough time if some part of the build depends on a tool too new for your VM. It would be infinitely simpler if one could simply 'cross-compile' down to older symbol versions, but the tooling does not make this easy at all.
> It would be infinitely simpler if one could simply 'cross-compile' down to older symbol versions, but the tooling does not make this easy at all.
It's definitely not easy, but it's possible: using the `.symver` assembly (pseudo-)directive you can specify the version of the symbol you want to link against.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/ (One example: hit "Show" on the table header for Win11, then use the form at the top of the page to highlight syscall 8c)
Changes in syscall numbers aren't necessarily breaking changes as you're supposed to use ntdll.dll to call kernel, not direct syscalls.
[deleted]
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#409This 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
This might be why OpenBSD looks attractive to some. Its kernel and all the different applications are fully integrated with each other -- no distros! It also tries to be simple, I believe, which makes it more secure and overall less buggy. To be honest, I think OSes are boring, and should have been that way since maybe 1995. The basic notions: multi-processing, context switching, tree-like file systems, multiple user…
Because Linux not an OS. The flagship OSS OS is Ubuntu, and it's mostly pretty stable. But OSS inherently implies the ability to make your own OS that's different from someone else's OS, so a bunch of people did just that.
Re: Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
#410Building GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web technologies might actually be more stable and productive.
I started with VB6 so I'm sometimes nostalgic for it too but let's not kid ourselves. We might take it for granted but React-like declarative top-down component model (as opposed to imperative UI) was a huge step forward. In particular that there's no difference between initial render or a re-render, and that updating state is enough for everything to propagate down. That's why it went beyond web, and why all modern…
> That's why it went beyond web, and why all modern native UI frameworks have a similar model these days.
It's more the other way around, this model started on desktop (eg WPF) and then React popularized it on the web.