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Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
- lproven 9mo agoI've heard worse ideas. Not much, but some. An AI-driven Linux, for instance.
- aggling 9mo agoThis is amusing but infeasible in practice because it would need to be behaviorally compatible with Windows, including all bugs along with app compatibility mitigations. Might as well just use Windows at that point.
- nialv7 9mo agoyou have full control of a Linux system. win32/linux respects your rights that microsoft doesn't. that's the difference.
- aggling 9mo agoThat is irrelevant to the feasibility of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.
- tapoxi 9mo agoIt's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30 years and has excellent compatibility at this point.
- aggling 9mo ago5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not excellent compatibility.
- winnnd 9mo agoRelative to (64-bit) windows 11, it might be.
- dleslie 9mo agoHow many of those entries have been tested with recent versions of wine or proton? Seems a poor metric. Better to consider is the Proton verified count, which has been rocketing upwards. https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
- nulbyte 9mo agoI would hazard a guess that most of those apps are garbage on Windows, too.
- raddan 9mo agoWINE has been reimplementing the Win32 ABI (not API) for decades. It already works pretty well; development has been driven by both volunteers and commercial developers (CodeWeavers) for a long time.
- aggling 9mo agoThere are many programs that still do not work properly in WINE, even though it has been developed for decades. This in itself demonstrates the infeasibility of reimplementing Win32 as a stable interface on par with Windows. The result after all this effort is still patchy and incomplete.
- toast0 9mo agoThere are many programs that do not work properly in Windows 11, so using Windows to run Windows programs doesn't work either.
- nialv7 9mo agoUnironically, yes. It's time that Microsoft taste their own medicine of embrace, extend, and extinguish.
- qingcharles 9mo agoHere me out: Microsoft switches to Linux kernel for Windows 13. (also Microsoft has been heavily embracing Linux and open source in the last decade)
- theandrewbailey 9mo agoWhen WSL first came out, I realized that Windows might be Linux + Wine in 20 or 30 years. Nowadays, with the Windows team barely able to produce a functional UI, what's happening with the NT kernel? Is it all graybeards back there? When they retire, the stability of Windows going to be in trouble, which is important for the things that really pull in the money. It'll get real bad, then they'll give up and move to an open source base, just like Edge.
- p_ing 9mo agoWhy would you want to switch to in many cases, an inferior kernel? NTOS is the golden piece of Windows -- it's Win32 that's hot garbage.
- ezoe 9mo agoBut would you want to run these Win32 software on Linux for daily use? I don't.
- pcdoodle 9mo ago[dead]
- pjmlp 9mo agoGamers have no other option, and thanks Valve, game studios have no reasons left to bother with native Linux clients. Just target Windows, business as usual, and let Valve do the hard work.
- cromka 9mo ago> Gamers have no other option, and thanks Valve, game studios have no reasons left to bother with native Linux clients But they do test their Windows games on Linux now and fix issues as needed. I read that CDProjekt does that, at least.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoCDProjekt releases native linux builds.
- not_a9 9mo agoI don’t think Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 have Linux builds available for the common folk? Cyberpunk has a ARM64 Mac build, though.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoHuh, I could have sworn Witcher 3 did, but maybe I am misremembering it merely releasing without DRM.
- 9mo ago
- rickcarlino 9mo agoBuilding GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web technologies might actually be more stable and productive.
- steve1977 9mo agoAnd more performant. Software written for 2005 Windows runs super fast on todays systems.
- HeckFeck 9mo agoSometimes I install Office 97 for kicks and marvel at how much I can do with it, yet it asks so little of my system. <2Mb RAM for Word 97!
- apatheticonion 9mo agoSame, I used to use Office 2003 because it was so quick and the UI was exactly what you needed. On later versions they had animated cursor positions which felt slow, the spellcheck squiglies were lethargic and menus convoluted. That said, I've given up and mostly use Google Docs/Sheets now because of the features and cross platform support.
- lproven 9mo agoSame here. I have a physical copy of Word 97, although TBH I use the classic licence key 11111-111111111 to "activate" it because it's easier. It runs fine under WINE, and you can install the 3 service packs for it too. As released, when you try to save a .RTF file it actually doesn't. Not that that matters, but it's nice to have all the known the bug fixes. It runs inside the L2 cache on any modern-ish CPU. Even on a Core 2 Duo, it's fast. It is hilarious and sad to recall that when it came out -- I was working for PC Pro magazine around then -- it was seen as big and bloated and sluggish compared to Office 95. The Mac version, Office 98, was a port of the Windows version, and Mac owners hated it. Now, it's tiny and sleek.
- andy_ppp 9mo agoHonestly, it’s probably faster and less resource intensive through emulation than your average Electron app :-/
- frumplestlatz 9mo agoTechnically it's the only stable macOS ABI, too. The only way to run a legacy 32-bit binary on macOS today is a win32 exe running under Wine.
- znpy 9mo ago> What is this? A dream of a Linux distribution where the entire desktop environment is Win32 software running under WINE. I might unironically use this. The Windows 2000 era desktop was light and practical. I wonder how well it performs with modern high-resolution, high-dpi displays.
- hxorr 9mo agoI've also had the same thought...
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo agoI’m in if this is happening
- mixmastamyk 9mo agoXfce already exists and has less impedance mismatch. It’s almost as good in some ways, probably better in a few tiny ones.
- znpy 9mo agoI already use xfce, of course!
- andrewf 9mo agoStarting with FreeBSD might be easier than starting with Debian then removing all the GNUisms. But perhaps not as much Type II fun.
- tssva 9mo agoUsing Linux gets you much more hardware compatibility especially for the consumer desktop and laptop systems this is targeted towards.
- andrewf 9mo agoTrue
- dvdkon 9mo agoI think Linux is the better choice for replacing the entire userland. From what I've seen, the BSDs don't have such an accessible userspace/kernelspace split. With some effort, on Linux you could probably just run an exe as your init.
- foxrider 9mo agoI mean... isn't that just X11 light compositor (like IceWM) with binfmt enabled?
- oybng 9mo agoIt still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away
- hypeatei 9mo agoIt still is if you're an enterprise customer. The retail users aren't Microsoft's cash cows, so they get ads and BS in their editions. The underlying APIs are still stable and MS provides the LTSC & Server editions to businesses which lack all that retail cruft.
- lelele 9mo agoDo you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?
- hypeatei 9mo agoYes. Enterprise, Pro, and Home are the enshittified, retail editions. Enterprise just adds a few more features IIRC but still has ads. The other versions I mentioned above don't have any of that.
- r_lee 9mo agoEnterprise is not retail and is usually done via volume licensing, but probably without any additional configuration it might have that stuff intact. But you can use group policy etc. freely. I don't know how Win 11 is though
- lelele 9mo agoFWIW, ChatGPT advised against LTSC or Server editions for a dev workstation and recommended Enterprise, as you do. However, I can’t find Enterprise from a reputable EU vendor. Do you know of any? Is Enterprise available to end users?
- pjmlp 9mo agoThus reinforcing development tools that target Windows desktop even further, the OS/2 lesson repeats itself. And failing everything else, Microsoft is in the position to put WSL center and front, and yet again, that is the laptops that normies will buy.
- dleslie 9mo agoNot to worry, Microsoft can't escape Win32 either. They've tried, with UWP and others, but they're locked in to supporting the ABI. It's not a moving target. Proton and Wine have shown it can be achieved with greater comparability than even what Microsoft offers.
- pjmlp 9mo agoWhile true, people should pay attention that WinRT, the technology infrastructure for UWP, nowadays lives in Win32 and is what is powering anything CoPilot+ PC, Windows ML, the Windows Terminal rewrite, new Explorer extensions, updated context menu on Windows 11,.... It is a moving target, Proton is mostly stuck on Windows XP world, before most new APIs started being a mix of COM and WinRT. Even if that isn't the case, almost no company would bother with GNU/Linux to develop with Win32, instead of Windows, Visual Studio, business as usual.
- dleslie 9mo agoFWIW, Wine 8.0 introduced some WinRT support, specifically Windows.Gaming.Input. It's a start.
- Ygg2 9mo agoDamn, they didn't miss a spot to add a Loss comic reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel)
- Lutzb 9mo agoThank you. I was contemplating the logo but my brain could not make the connection.
- tosti 9mo agoThis is only ever relevant for proprietary software. Free software does not require a stable ABI. Great that wine exists but it should be useless. (That and Linux doesn't implement win32 and wine doesn't exclusively run on Linux.)
- Nextgrid 9mo agoFree software can still benefit from a stable ABI. If I want to run the software, it's better to download it in a format my CPU can understand, rather than download source, figure out the dependencies, wait for compiling (let's say it's a large project like Firefox or Chromium that takes hours to compile), and so on.
- graemep 9mo ago> If I want to run the software, it's better to download it in a format my CPU can understand, rather than download source, figure out the dependencies, wait for compiling (let's say it's a large project like Firefox or Chromium that takes hours to compile), and so on. If its a choice between downloading a binary that depends on a stable ABI and compiling the source. They way most Linux software gets installed is downloading a binary that has been compiled for your OS version (from repos), and the next most common way of installing is compiling source through a system that figures out the dependencies for you (source based distros and repos).
- juliangmp 9mo agoStable interfaces and not being in versioning hell (cough libc) would actually be good for FOSS as well. If you make a piece of software today and want to package it for Linux its an absolute mess. I mean, look at flatpack or docker, a common solution for this is to ship your own userspace, thats just insane.
- tracker1 9mo agoAgreed... I'm kind of a fan of AppImage/Flatpak/Snap (less Snap, but still)... even then, I don't use a lot of apps, and most of my variety is usually via Docker. It's much more bloated than it should be, but the best way to reliably run old/new software in any given Linux.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoCrazy how, thanks to Wine/Proton, Linux is now more compatible with old Windows games than Windows itself. There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows, but through Steam they're click-to-play on Linux.
- jimbobthrowawy 9mo agoWine works on windows too. It's used by the shorthorn project to get software for newer versions of windows to run under XP.
- bigyabai 9mo agoYep, for some games like Elden Ring it even fixes Windows-specific performance hiccups: https://youtu.be/vAooLiCy7rE https://youtu.be/vAooLiCy7rE
- cryptonector 9mo agoWhoa. Can it be used to run older software on newer Windows too?
- account42 9mo agoGOG used to ship Wine ddraw.dll with some games although for this specific use case there are better options now (e.g. cnc-ddraw).
- andsoitis 9mo ago> There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows What are some examples?
- shakna 9mo agoAnything around DirectX 10 and older has issues with Windows, these days. One more popular example is Grid 2, another is Morrowind. Both crash on launch, unless you tweak a lot of things, and even then it won't always succeed. Need for Speed II: SE is "platinum" on Wine, and pretty much unable to be run at all on Windows 11.
- the__alchemist 9mo agoYea! I love the spirit. Compatibility in computing is consternating. If my code is compiled for CPU Arch X, the OS should just provide it with (using Rust terminology) standard library tools (networking, file system, and allocator etc) , de-conflict it with other programs, and get out of the way. The barriers between OSes, including between various linux dependencies feels like a problem we (idealistically thinking) shouldn't have.
- antirez 9mo agoThe difference between Win32 and Linux is that the latter didn't realize an operating system is more than a kernel and a number of libraries and systems glued together, but is, indeed, a stable ABI (even for kernel modules -- so old drivers will be usable forever), a default, unique and stable API for user interface, audio, ..., and so forth. Linux failed completely not technologically, but to understand what an OS is from the POV of a product.
- jcelerier 9mo agoLinux didn't aim to be an OS in the consumer sense (it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific literature OS == kernel, nothing else).The "consumer" OS is GNU/Linux or Android/Linux.
- i80and 9mo agoThere really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system, proportionately.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoExactly, Gnome/Linux or KDE/Linux would make a lot more sense.
- graemep 9mo agoExcept that it can be both and more: you can have Gnome, KDE, and other DEs and libraries installed and use app based on all of them simultaneously.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoSure, although every distro has a default. systemd/Linux maybe? Lots of things are more significant than GNU, either way.
- pndy 9mo ago
- jimbobthrowawy 9mo agoI think there's a quote from Linus himself saying this.
- senfiaj 9mo agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
- kwanbix 9mo agoI agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the latest Mint or Ubuntu distros. Stuff that worked before just breaks, especially if the app isn’t in the repo.
- kccqzy 9mo agoThat’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.
- SkiFire13 9mo agoEveryone is mentioning ABI, but this is really an API problem, so "you only need API compatibility at that point" is a very big understatement.
- rep_lodsb 9mo agoSo 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.
- realusername 9mo agoNot sure if it's the right solution but it's a description of what happens right now in practice yes.
- bobajeff 9mo agoI like this idea and know at least a few who would love to use this if you can solve for the: 'unfortunate rough edges that people only tolerate because they use WINE as a last resort' Whether those rough edges will ever be ironed out is a matter I'll leave to other people. But I love that someone is attempting this just because of the tenacity it shows. This reminds me of projects like asahi and cosmopolitan c. Now if we're to do something to actually solve for Gnu/Linux Desktops not having a stable ABI I think one solution would be to make a compatibility layer like Wine's but using Ubuntu's ABIs. Then as long as the app runs on supported Ubuntu releases it will run on a system with this layer. I just hope it wouldn't be a buggy mess like flatpak is.
- mikewarot 9mo agoI'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.
- HeckFeck 9mo agoServer 2003 was the last release supervised by Cutler, so would have my vote. It's even source-available... technically.
- sedatk 9mo agoCutler himself wrote code for Vista/Longhorn though. I don't know what you mean by "supervising" it. He also led the efforts for "PatchGuard" kernel protection mechanism that was introduced with Vista. Source: I reviewed Cutler's lock-free data structure changes in Vista/Longhorn to find bugs in them, failed to find any.
- HeckFeck 9mo agoAH, I was repeating something I read elsewhere, but I'll defer to an eyewitness. Must've been pretty cool working on Windows back then. Maybe it was more varied than my line of work. I must escape the drudgery B2B SaaS Webcrapps.
- PTOB 9mo ago> 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."
- PTOB 9mo agoI see my comment was downvoted, and I apologize. I meant to agree entirely with the parent comment by showing one specific way in which Win2K SP4 is far superior to Windows 11. In Win2K, Task Manager takes less than a second to start on a 200 MHz, single core Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and a 5400 RPM IDE HDD.
- haunter 9mo agoReference to the famous “Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" post https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
- apexalpha 9mo agoI build a gaming VM and decided to go with Windows because the latest AMD drivers (upscaling etc..) only works there for now. I wanted to be nice and entered a genuine Windows key still in my laptop's firmware somewhere. As a thank you Microsoft pulled dozens of the features out of my OS, including remote desktop. As soon as these latest FSR drivers are ported over I will swap to Linux. What a racket, lol.
- goku12 9mo agoCan somebody explain: 1. The exact problem with the Linux ABI 2. What causes it (the issues that makes it such a challenge) 3. How it changed over the years, and its current state 4. Any serious attempts to resolve it I've been on Linux for may be 2 decades at this point. I haven't noticed any issues with ABI so far, perhaps because I use everything from the distro repo or build and install them using the package manager. If I don't understand it, there are surely others who want to know it too. (Not trying to brag here. I'm referring to the time I've spent on it.) I know that this is a big ask. The best course for me is of course to research it myself. But those who know the whole history tend to have a well organized perspective of it, as well as some invaluable insights that are not recorded anywhere else. So if this describes you, please consider writing it down for others. Blog is probably the best format for this.
- amelius 9mo agoYou never ran into a GLIBC version problem?
- muth02446 9mo agoWasn't there also DLL hell on Windows? My understanding is that very old statically linked Linux images still run today because paraphrasing Linus: "we don't break user space".
- mook 9mo agoUnfortunately you can't really statically link a GUI app. Also, if you happened to have linked that image to a.out it wouldn't work if you're using a kernel from this year, but that's probably not the case ;)
- muth02446 9mo ago> Unfortunately you can't really statically link a GUI app. But is there any fundamental reason why not? > Also, if you happened to have linked that image to a.out it wouldn't work if > you're using a kernel from this year, but that's probably not the case ;) I assume you refer to the retirement of coff support (in favor of elf). I would argue that given how long this obsolete format was supported was actually quite impressive.
- TimTheTinker 9mo agoThis is a really cool idea. My only gripe is that Win32 is necessarily built on x86. AArch64/ARM is up and coming, and other architectures may arise in the future. Perhaps that could be mitigated if someone could come up with an awesome OSS machine code translation layer like Apple's Rosetta.
- qcnguy 9mo agoThere's not much x86 specific about Win32 and you can make native ARM Windows programs for years already. WinNT was designed to be portable from the start. Windows/ARM comes with a Rosetta like system and can run Intel binaries out of the box.
- realusername 9mo agoNot sure on Windows but with Wine you can totally use Win32 on arm.
- robotnikman 9mo agoValve certainly seems to be making progress on it with Proton.
- realusername 9mo agoThey are helping to use x86 apps on arm but if you wanted, you could already use windows arm apps on Linux arm without any problem.
- phendrenad2 9mo agoThis is going to be a bold claim but here goes. This will never work, because it isn't a radical enough departure from Linux. Linux occupies the bottom of a well in the cartesian space. Any deviation is an uphill battle. You'll die trying to reach escape velocity. The forcing factors that pull you back down: 1. Battles-testedness. The mainstream Linux distros just have more eyeballs on them. That means your WINE-first distro (which I'll call "Lindows" in honor of the dead OS from 2003) will have bugs that make people consider abandoning the dream and going back to Gnome Fedora. 2. Cool factor. Nobody wants to open up their riced-out Linux laptop in class and have their classmate look over and go "yo this n** running windows 85!" (So, you're going to have to port XMonad to WINE. I don't make the rules!) 3. Kernel churn. People will want to run this thing on their brand-new gaming laptop. That likely means they'll need a recent kernel. And while they "never break userspace" in theory, in practice you'll need a new set of drivers and MESA and other add-ons that WILL breaks things. Especially things like 3D apps running through WINE (not to mention audio). Google can throw engineers at the problem of keeping Chromium working across graphics stacks. But can you? If you could plant your flag in the dirt and say "we fork here" and make a radical left turn from mainline Linux, and get a cohort of kernel devs and app developers to follow you, you'd have a chance.
- guerrilla 9mo agoWhatever, at least it can be a desktop alternative to GNOME and KDE where you can also run exes.
- GuestFAUniverse 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene Again?
- esbranson 9mo agoCool. Having major distributions default to using binfmt_misc to register Wine for PE executables (EXE files) would be nice though. Next steps would obviously be for Windows apps to have their own OS-level identity, confined and permissioned per app using normal Linux security mechanisms, run against a reproducible and pinned Wine runtime with clearly managed state, integrated with the desktop as normal applications (launching, file associations, icons), and produce per-app logs and crash information, so they can be operated and managed like native programs. We have AI now, this should not be rocket science or require major investments. Only viable way Linux is replacing Windows.
- robotnikman 9mo ago>Cool. Having major distributions default to using binfmt_misc to register Wine for PE executables (EXE files) would be nice though This is something that is very much needed to make Linux much more user friendly for new users.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoSomeone please create a windows 7 like user interface or even XP like interface too and you got yourself a serious fan I might seriously recommend it to newbies and like there is just this love I have for windows 7 even though I really didn't use it for much but its so much more elegant in its own way than windows 10 like it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.
- fragmede 9mo agoXFCE plus a windows theme would get you pretty far. Is there anything specific you're thinking of which that plus some pre-configured Wine wouldn't hit?
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoI 100% agree with your comment. Pro tip but if someone wants to create their own iso as well, they can probably just customize things imperatively in MxLinux even by just booting them up in your ram and then they have the magnificient option of basically snapshotting it and converting that into an iso so its definitely possible to create an iso tweaked down to your configuration without any hassle (trust me but its the best way to create iso's without too much hassle and if one wants hassle, nix or bootc seems to be the way to go) Regarding Why it wouldn't hit. I don't know, I already build some of my own iso's and I can build one for windows (on MxLinux principle) and upload it for free on huggingface perhaps but the idea is of mass appeal Yes I can do that but I would prefer if there was an iso which could just do that and I could share it with a new person in linux. And yes I could have the new person do the changes themselves but (why?), there really is no reason perhaps imo and this just feels like a low hanging fruit which nobody touched perhaps and so this is why I was curious too. But also as the other comment pointed out, I feel like sure we can do this thing, but that there is definitely a genuine reason why we can probably create this thing itself as well and they give some good reasons as well and I agree with them overall too. Like if you ask me, it would be fun to have more options especially considering this is linux where freedom is celebrated :p
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
- theLiminator 9mo agoLol I didn't realize that my joke is actually real https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366998#46368990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366998#46368990
- layer8 9mo agoI’m slowly coming around to it.
- guerrilla 9mo agoI absolutely love this. I need a live CD/USB ASAP please!
- dmitrygr 9mo agoThing is, I want the opposite. I want the NT/2k/w7 kernel and XFCE on top. NT kernel is infinitely better designed and has much better support on latest intel/amd hardware than Linux. And XFCE is much better than modern windows ui.
- viraptor 9mo ago> has much better support on latest intel/amd hardware In what way?
- dmitrygr 9mo agoClose Linux laptop. Wait 1 week. Open it. 100% Dead. Do same to windows laptop. 60% chance it is alive — better. MacBook? 100%
- viraptor 9mo agoThat's really not the case overall. My experience: Linux - sure, the battery won't last a week in sleep, but it will revert to hibernation and start anyway. Windows - got 2 laptops which just won't go to sleep automatically since w11 - either force hibernation, or it will overheat in a bag and drain in hours. Mac - constant wakeups to connect to the internet (that I can't disable even though I tried many times) drain the battery in days.
- levibev 9mo ago[dead]
- nineteen999 9mo ago> The late-90's-to-early-2010's PC desktop experience was great for power users, especially creative users. Let's keep the dream alive. It sure was, if you were already bored by Windows 3.11/95 and were getting into Linux, it was fantastic. You were getting skills at the ground floor which could help keep you in good career for most of the rest of your life.
- voidfunc 9mo agoYou son of a bitch, im in! Love this idea. Love where it is coming from.
- pseudony 9mo agoI think this project actually has merit and highlights the core issue. We have gone through one perceived reason after the other to try and explain why the year of the Linux desktop wasn’t this one. Uncharitably, Linux is too busy breaking and deprecating itself to ever become more than a server OS, and that only works due to companies sponsoring most the testing and code that makes those parts work. Desktop in all its forms is an unmitigated shit show. With linux, you’re always one kernel/systemd/$sound system/desktop upgrade away from a broken system. Personal pains: nvidia drivers, oss->alsa, alsa->pulse audio, pulse audio->pipe wire, init.d to upstart to systemd, anything dkms ever, bash to dash, gtk2 to gtk3, kde3 to kde4 (basically a decade?), gnome 2 to gnome 3, some 10 gnome 3 releases breaking plugins I relied on. It should be blindingly obvious; windows can shove ads everywhere from the tray bar to start menu and even the damned lock screen, on enterprise editions no less, and STILL have users. This should tell you that linux is missing something. It’s not the install barrier (it’s never been lower, corporate IT could issue linux laptops, linux on laptops exist from several vendors). It’s also not software, the world has never placed so many core apps in the browser (even office, these days). It’s not gaming. Though its telling that, in the end, the solution from valve (proton) incidentally solves two issues - porting (stable) windows APIs to linux and packaging a complete mini-linux because we can’t interoperate between distros or even releases of the same distro. I think the complete and utter disdain in linux for stability from libraries through subsystems to desktop servers, ui toolkits and the very desktops themselves is the core problem. And solving through package management and the ensuing fragmentation from distros a close second.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo agoPretty sure it's Linux not being the default option
- ogogmad 9mo agoDoesn't explain why Chrome beat IE. Or why MacOS has higher market share on the desktop than Linux. Wine and Proton should have levelled the playing field. But they haven't. Also, if you've only just started using Linux, I recommend you wait a few years before forming an opinion.
- aussieguy1234 9mo agoWhile this might appeal to retro enthusiasts, I could see a Linux based drop in replacement for Windows 10/11 getting traction amongst mainstream users, especially if it had a good UI/UX. Your average user might not even know its Linux.
- kasajian 9mo agoI'll check back every few years to see if either this project, Wine or ReactOS can run Visual Studio 2026 (or 2022) and .NET Framework 4. Not talking about the cross-platform versions of .NET and VS-Code. I'm specifically talking about the Windows-specific software I mentioned above. I don't see this happening, despite the fact that by now, these types of porting efforts were supposed to be trivial because of AI. Yeah, I'll wait.
- jccx70 9mo agoYou better change software.
- fithisux 9mo agoInteresting concept. If it works why not? 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.
- fithisux 9mo agoAre the people behind this project the same as the Free95 team?
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoIsn't that the OS from the 1990's that never got anywhere, and then the same people made ReactOS? googles Ah, no, that was FreeWin95. What on earth is Free95, it feels like history repeating itself…
- fithisux 9mo agoOne month ago their site went dark https://github.com/versoft-software/free95/ https://github.com/versoft-software/free95/ They also forked Uinxed kernel so as to run their userland. I believe they are the same. Still, it makes sense what they are trying to do.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoTo be honest, this seems like a project by some kid or something that has absolutely no idea what they're doing. It's a little painful to witness.
- lproven 9mo agoI agree. I wrote an article saying so about 9 months ago. As a little Yule gift, one of the creators wrote me a hatemail at Xmas telling me he still remembered and it still burned and what a bad person I was. Well, he got his own back. I was hurt, too. Perhaps he thinks that makes us even. Share the pain.
- fsiefken 9mo agoAlternatively one could also use OneCore patched XP with MSYS2/MinGW/Cygwin with Bash, gnu tooling and the pacman package manager. One could compile most necessary software by hand. It runs a modern firefox, libreoffice and Windows7 games. Perhaps most of python, rust and node ecosystems would run. Or if one really needs a linux/wsl light alternative one could run virtualbox, qemu or colinux (up to the ancient kernel 2.6.33). Who needs 64 bit if the lean and mean 32-bit suffices and the Windows classic theme is included? Small llm's would probably not work, while they would with Loss32
- gaigalas 9mo agohttps://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/35#issuecomment-1085275804 https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/35#issuecomment-... The idea of "fuck it, let's do Windows everywhere" was introduced by Justine Tunney as an April Fools Joke in the Cosmopolitan repository. That's it. An april fools joke.
- typ 9mo agoRather than API/ABI stability, I think the problem is the lack of coherence and too many fragile dependencies. Like, why should a component as essential as Systemd have to depend on a non-essential service called d-bus? Which in turn depends on an XML parser lib named libexpat. Just d-bus and libexpat combined takes a few megabytes. Last time I checked, the entire NT kernel, and probably the Linux kernel image as well, has no more than single-digit MBs in size. And by the way, Systemd itself doesn’t use XML for configurations. It has an INI style configuration format.
- johnny22 9mo agothat's why they are doing varlink now
- ajb 9mo agoAs of the time of writing the first hundred or so comments are on tangents, so TLDR: this is about making a "Linux distribution" of which all the userland software is win32 software running on Wine. The idea, among others, is to recreate the experience of '90s..'10s versions of Windows. It's at an early stage.
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoThis is weird I only use Wine for games, but the name's clever. All my other software is natively Linux, even Steam itself.
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- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoI like the idea of it, but Linux hardware support is still crap, and will get worse as ARM becomes more entrenched. What boggles my mind is why Google hasn't gotten more serious about making Android a desktop OS. Pay the money needed to get good hardware support, control the OS, and now you're a Microsoft/Apple competitor for devices. Yes there is the Chromebook, but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy. Google could control both the browser market and the desktop computing market if they seriously tried. (But then again that would require listening to customers and providing support, so nevermind)
- singpolyma3 9mo ago> Linux hardware support is still crap What are you talking about? The majority of hardware is supported by only Linux at this point.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoThere is plenty of hardware that is either unsupported or poorly supported. I have personally run into a dozen different devices and several architectures that were unsupported. And I'm just one person buying normal stuff in stores.
- singpolyma3 9mo agoSure but this is true of every OS. I can't install macOS or Windows on most of the hardware around me and have it support all the hardware either.
- lillecarl 9mo ago> I like the idea of it, but Linux hardware support is still crap, and will get worse as ARM becomes more entrenched. Linux arguably has better compatibility than Windows, but it's nuanced as it depends on what devices you're interested in. > What boggles my mind is why Google hasn't gotten more serious about making Android a desktop OS. Google is seriously working on making Android a desktop OS, Android 16 is only the first steps towards it. > Yes there is the Chromebook, but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy. ChromeOS is very much not a toy, it's pretty great if it can facilitate your work. > But then again that would require listening to customers and providing support, so nevermind Google has consistently provided good support for all their hardware products, listening to customers is not their cup of tea though. Google is absolutely no saint, I don't like their business model, how they're closing more and more of Android, how they keep killing services, how GCP can nuke AI nuke you, that they "own" web standards, ... But they're not all bad, they've also contributed greatly to much of the web and surrounding technologies.
- KerrAvon 9mo agoI love the idea of ending the Wayland vs X argument by supplanting them with GDI+ (kind of implied, though not explicitly stated, by this proposal).
- apatheticonion 9mo ago+1 A 1:1 recreation of the Windows XP or Windows 7 user experience with the classic theme would be killer. I say this with love, I have used KDE extensively and I still find it more janky than Windows XP. Gnome is "better" (especially since v40) in that it's consistent and has a few nicer utilities, but it also has worse UX (at least for power users) than Windows XP.
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- jccx70 9mo ago"Yes. I can't tell you how many times the ability to just download a goddamn .exe file and run it in WINE has saved my ass. Seemingly every creative project I undertake eventually requires downloading some piece of software which is either impossible or impractical to rebuild myself, and whose Linux and macOS ports no longer work or never existed. There's more than three decades of Win32 software — .exe files! — that can run in WINE or (of course) on Windows. No other ABI has that kind of compatibility record. WINE can even run Win16 stuff too. The really cool thing about Win32 is it's also the world's stable ABI. There's lots of fields of software where the GNU/Linux and POSIX-y offerings available are quite limited and generally poor in quality, e.g. creative software and games. Win32 gives you access to a much larger slice of humanity's cultural inheritance. " What a pile of bullshitting.
- jccx70 9mo agoIt's like having the dream of running Visual Studio 2026 on linux: COMPLETELY RETARDED.
- stuaxo 9mo agoNice. It would be good if winetricks could install the ReactOS userland, explorer.exe and friends barely exist in upstream wine. There were some great efforts to build these out in ReactOS a few years ago.
- M95D 9mo agoWine 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.