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Convert Linux to Windows

philipbohun.com

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Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#61

Post by trelane »

the__alchemist wrote: post #45
Const-me wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux That doesn’t work for GUI programs which use a hardware 3D GPU. Linux doesn’t have a universally available GPU API: some systems have GL, some have GLES, some have Vulkan, all 3 come in multiple versions of limited compatibility, and optional features many of them are vendor specific. In contrast, it’s impossible…

Question, from an application developer's perspective: What is the implication in regards to cross-platform Vulkan applications? I.e., my 3D applications all use Vulkan, and they compile and just work on both Windows, and Ubuntu. Does this mean that on other or older distros, they might not work?

I'm not sure what they are taking about. And they might not know what they're taking about.

All Linuxes I'm familiar with run Mesa, which gives you OpenGL and Vulkan.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#62

Post by skissane »

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…

> And while glibc is backward compatible & that generally does work, glibc is NOT forward compatible which is a huge problem - it means that you have to build on the oldest bistro you can find so that the built binaries actually work on arbitrary machines you try to run it on.

Isn’t this easily solved by building in a container? Something a lot of people do anyway - I do it all the time because it insulates the build from changes in the underlying build agents - if the CI team decides to upgrade the build agent OS to a new release next month or migrate them to a different distro, building in a container (mostly) isolates my build job from that change, doing it directly on the agents exposes it to them

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#63

Post by sevensor »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #57

People always talk about this “I can run a 20 year .exe file” situation but when I tell you that I have never, in 30+ years, EVER had a need to run a 20+ year executable, it just makes me go… yeah, and? Sure I believe backwards compatibility is a nice to have feature, but I have never, nor do I think I will ever, have a need to run 20-year-old software.

My experience is that a 20 year old exe file has a greater chance of running in wine than it would in windows, and a 20 year old Linux executable is going to fail because the shared libraries it depends on are unobtainable

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#65

Post by Const-me »

the__alchemist wrote: post #45
Const-me wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux That doesn’t work for GUI programs which use a hardware 3D GPU. Linux doesn’t have a universally available GPU API: some systems have GL, some have GLES, some have Vulkan, all 3 come in multiple versions of limited compatibility, and optional features many of them are vendor specific. In contrast, it’s impossible…

Question, from an application developer's perspective: What is the implication in regards to cross-platform Vulkan applications? I.e., my 3D applications all use Vulkan, and they compile and just work on both Windows, and Ubuntu. Does this mean that on other or older distros, they might not work?

I don’t think the support depends on distros much, I think the main variable is hardware. If you have a desktop PC bought in the last ~5 years the support should be OK, for the hardware older than that the support is not guaranteed. GeForce GT 730 (launched in 2014) doesn’t support Vulkan, Intel only supports Vulkan on Windows starting from Skylake launched in 2015.

Then there’re quality issues. If you search internets for “Windows Vulkan issue” you’ll find many end users with crashing games, game developers with crashing game engines https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/100807 recommendations to update drivers or disable some Vulkan layers in registry, etc.

On Windows, Vulkan is simply not as reliable as D3D. The reasons include market share, D3D being a requirement to render the desktop, D3D runtime being a part of the OS supported by Microsoft (Vulkan relies solely on GPU vendors), and D3D being older (first version of VK spec released in 2016, D3D11 is from 2009).

Another thing, on Linux, the situation with Vulkan support is less than ideal for mobile and embedded systems. Some embedded ARM SoCs only support GLES 3.1 (which BTW is not too far from D3D 11.0 feature-wise) but not Vulkan.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#66

Post by keyringlight »

hagbard_c wrote: post #21
delusional wrote: post #17

> We also already have a simple way to run Windows applications, Wine. Are you high? There is nothing simple about Wine. It's at once a kludgy mess and a technical masterpiece, what it isn't is simple.

Fairly simple for the end user, not simple in its implementation.

Like a lot of things in any OS it depends how far off the beaten track you go. I think there's a lot of gaming newcomers to linux where their main exposure for wine is via steam, which generally wraps things up for them and hides the details behind their launcher. If you need to go diving into the details for compatibility or you'd like to separate things out with prefixes then it's definitely much less polished and elegant, but I'd argue you could say the same thing about windows for compatibility with some old games or sites like PCGamingWiki.com would be a lot smaller as the combinations of windows (or DOS)+drivers+hardware over the years hasn't resulted in perfect consistent compatibility.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#68

Post by pdonis »

To the extent binary distribution is "unstable" on Linux, it's because users aren't expected to just download random binaries from wherever, as is normal on Windows (and Mac, for that matter). Users are expected to either obtain binaries from their distro, or compile them from source. In either case, all of the issues about binary distribution being "unstable" are invisible to users. Which is the point. People who want the broken Windows software model can just..run Windows. The last thing any sane Linux user wants is to make Linux into Windows. I run Linux to avoid Windows.

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#69

Post by trelane »

pdonis wrote: post #68

To the extent binary distribution is "unstable" on Linux, it's because users aren't expected to just download random binaries from wherever, as is normal on Windows (and Mac, for that matter). Users are expected to either obtain binaries from their distro, or compile them from source. In either case, all of the issues about binary distribution being "unstable" are invisible to users. Which is the point. People who wa…

There's also flatpak and friends

Re: Convert Linux to Windows

#70

Post by d3Xt3r »

rkagerer wrote: post #16
d3Xt3r wrote: post #4

Zorin OS supports running .exes directly (via Wine of course). https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/windows-app-support/

This is the first time I've heard of that [Ubuntu?] distro. Would be curious to hear how it's working out, from anyone using it as their daily driver, and how it compares to Mint etc. on the Linux side of things.

My mum was using it as a daily-driver for all your average user PC stuff. It was decent, easily to use and more user-friendly than Mint, IMO – until an update borked it completely, after two years of running. Unfortunately post-update-breakages is something that's typical of Ubuntu and most Ubuntu-based distros, so it's not really surprising [1]. I've since switched her to an immutable distro (Aurora [2]) and it's been rock solid.

[1] https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/ [2] https://getaurora.dev/en

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