3 ms·

Hardly surprising, but it's an interesting situation. The only company in the world that wants and needs Windows XP to disappear is Microsoft; for everyone else

by kprobst 16y ago

Hardly surprising, but it's an interesting situation. The only company in the world that wants and needs Windows XP to disappear is Microsoft; for everyone else XP is an enormously bountiful source of users and revenue. It would be suicidal for Mozilla or Google to say "we won't support XP", just as it's fatal for Microsoft to linger on an 11-year old platform that eats into their revenue stream. Interesting dilemma.

contextfree 16y ago
How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there an opportunity here?
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  ReactOS is just WINE on top of a custom Windows-like kernel. All of the real action in reimplementing Windows occurs in WINE, afaik. It's pretty far from "full XP compatibility", but a lot of stuff works just fine. I'd love to see WINE considered a big investment center for people like Canonical. I think WINE and open graphics drivers are the two biggest parts holding back desktop Linux. Even if WINE could get .NET compatibility, that'd be a huge step forward (right now it has trouble running any of MS's .NET frameworks correctly). The reality is it's going to take a lot of money and especially time to cause the lock-in of Win-only apps to fully regress; it'd be a lot faster to work with it and cause almost everything to work perfectly on WINE. Office and .NET are the biggest hold-ups atm. The problem with major investment in WINE is that as soon as MS thinks that suing CodeWeavers/any other WINE investors or distributors would be less harmful than allowing the project to continue without the extra attention, they're going to drop some big patent litigation all over that. MS is not just going to sit back while WINE plays a fundamental role in killing Windows -- as soon as it becomes serious, look for a major, relentless attack by MS.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers. And the best option you've got for .NET-compatibility is Mono. But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal problems.
    - cookiecaper 16y ago
      Yes, the ability to use native drivers on ReactOS stems from writing a kernel that mimics the Windows kernel API/ABI as closely as possible. The ReactOS userland, however, is provided primarily by WINE. You can think of ReactOS primarily as an open kernel compatible with Windows's kernel API, and WINE as an open userland compatible with Windows's userland APIs. ReactOS isn't rewriting WINE, they use WINE extensively. The main unique work of ReactOS is the Windows-compatible kernel. Mono is helpful for pure .NET directly from a Unix environment. However, Mono is more of an open .NET development environment than a .NET compatibility environment; while Mono can run a lot of .NET apps that are made for Windows, that's almost incidental of compatibility with the CLR bytecode. There are important implementation differences that Mono is aware of and has no intention to correct because, unlike WINE, Mono is not really a compatibility layer. Additionally, many Windows programs launch .NET programs directly, and afaik it's not very easy to get them to use Mono by default. For instance, I recently purchased C&C 4 on Steam, but it's a pain to make it work because circumventing the .NET-based launcher wants me to include an EA ID (I could use a fake auth server but just don't feel like putting that much effort in), and launching directly doesn't work because of the .NET-based launcher (.NET doesn't work). Further, more and more products are relying on .NET components, including Visual Studio, Office, and other big things. I think getting the .NET runtimes working well should be one of the main goals for WINE devs.

by kprobst 16y ago

contextfree 16y ago

How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there an opportunity here?

cookiecaper 16y ago
ReactOS is just WINE on top of a custom Windows-like kernel. All of the real action in reimplementing Windows occurs in WINE, afaik. It's pretty far from "full XP compatibility", but a lot of stuff works just fine. I'd love to see WINE considered a big investment center for people like Canonical. I think WINE and open graphics drivers are the two biggest parts holding back desktop Linux. Even if WINE could get .NET compatibility, that'd be a huge step forward (right now it has trouble running any of MS's .NET frameworks correctly). The reality is it's going to take a lot of money and especially time to cause the lock-in of Win-only apps to fully regress; it'd be a lot faster to work with it and cause almost everything to work perfectly on WINE. Office and .NET are the biggest hold-ups atm. The problem with major investment in WINE is that as soon as MS thinks that suing CodeWeavers/any other WINE investors or distributors would be less harmful than allowing the project to continue without the extra attention, they're going to drop some big patent litigation all over that. MS is not just going to sit back while WINE plays a fundamental role in killing Windows -- as soon as it becomes serious, look for a major, relentless attack by MS.
- bad_user 16y ago
  AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers. And the best option you've got for .NET-compatibility is Mono. But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal problems.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    Yes, the ability to use native drivers on ReactOS stems from writing a kernel that mimics the Windows kernel API/ABI as closely as possible. The ReactOS userland, however, is provided primarily by WINE. You can think of ReactOS primarily as an open kernel compatible with Windows's kernel API, and WINE as an open userland compatible with Windows's userland APIs. ReactOS isn't rewriting WINE, they use WINE extensively. The main unique work of ReactOS is the Windows-compatible kernel. Mono is helpful for pure .NET directly from a Unix environment. However, Mono is more of an open .NET development environment than a .NET compatibility environment; while Mono can run a lot of .NET apps that are made for Windows, that's almost incidental of compatibility with the CLR bytecode. There are important implementation differences that Mono is aware of and has no intention to correct because, unlike WINE, Mono is not really a compatibility layer. Additionally, many Windows programs launch .NET programs directly, and afaik it's not very easy to get them to use Mono by default. For instance, I recently purchased C&C 4 on Steam, but it's a pain to make it work because circumventing the .NET-based launcher wants me to include an EA ID (I could use a fake auth server but just don't feel like putting that much effort in), and launching directly doesn't work because of the .NET-based launcher (.NET doesn't work). Further, more and more products are relying on .NET components, including Visual Studio, Office, and other big things. I think getting the .NET runtimes working well should be one of the main goals for WINE devs.