[HN Gopher] Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux
Author : akka47
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-12-29 19:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (loss32.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (loss32.org)
| lproven wrote:
| I've heard worse ideas. Not much, but some. An AI-driven Linux,
| for instance.
| aggling wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| you have full control of a Linux system. win32/linux respects
| your rights that microsoft doesn't. that's the difference.
| aggling wrote:
| That is irrelevant to the feasibility of reimplementing the
| Win32 API on Linux.
| tapoxi wrote:
| It's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30
| years and has excellent compatibility at this point.
| aggling wrote:
| 5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB
| have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not
| excellent compatibility.
| winnnd wrote:
| Relative to (64-bit) windows 11, it might be.
| dleslie wrote:
| How 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/
| nulbyte wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that most of those apps are
| garbage on Windows, too.
| raddan wrote:
| WINE 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| There are many programs that do not work properly in
| Windows 11, so using Windows to run Windows programs
| doesn't work either.
| nialv7 wrote:
| Unironically, yes. It's time that Microsoft taste their own
| medicine of embrace, extend, and extinguish.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Here me out: Microsoft switches to Linux kernel for Windows 13.
|
| (also Microsoft has been heavily embracing Linux and open
| source in the last decade)
| ezoe wrote:
| But would you want to run these Win32 software on Linux for daily
| use? I don't.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Gamers 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| CDProjekt releases native linux builds.
| not_a9 wrote:
| I don't think Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 have Linux
| builds available for the common folk? Cyberpunk has a
| ARM64 Mac build, though.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Huh, I could have sworn Witcher 3 did, but maybe I am
| misremembering it merely releasing without DRM.
| chungy wrote:
| Witcher 2 had a Linux native build, but never Witcher 3.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not really, most leave that to Valve.
| kaoD wrote:
| Well, not having Proton definitely didn't work to grow gaming
| on Linux.
|
| Maybe Valve can play the reverse switcheroo out of
| Microsoft's playbook and, once enough people are on Linux,
| force the developers' hand by not supporting Proton anymore.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _...game studios have no reasons left to bother with native
| Linux clients._
|
| How many game studios were bothering with native Linux
| clients before Proton became known?
| mpyne wrote:
| That's exactly the point. They weren't, so a Linux user
| didn't have an option to run a native Linux client in
| preference to a Win32 version.
|
| That goes back to address the original question of "But
| would you want to run these Win32 software on Linux for
| daily use?"
| pjmlp wrote:
| More than now, I own a few from the Loki Entertainment
| days.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Depends on what task you're doing, and to a certain extent how
| you prefer to do it. For example sure there's plenty of ways to
| tag/rename media files, but I've yet to find something that
| matches the power of Mp3tag in a GUI under linux.
| m01 wrote:
| Have you tried kid3 (https://kid3.kde.org)? It has both a GUI
| and a CLI.
|
| From a quick glance at the feature lists it looks quite
| comparable.
| jcelerier wrote:
| For making music as much as I love the free audio ecosystem
| there's some very unique audio plugins with specific sounds
| that will never be ported. Thankfully bridging with wine works
| fairly well nowadays.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I use some cool ham radio software, a couple SDR applications,
| and a lithophane generator for my 3d printer. It all works
| great, if you have a cool utility or piece of software, why
| wouldn't you want to?
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Building GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web
| technologies might actually be more stable and productive.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Honestly, it's probably faster and less resource intensive
| through emulation than your average Electron app :-/
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Wine Is Not an Emulator (WINE). It provides win32 APIs; your
| CPU will handle the instructions natively. There is no
| "probably" about it.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Whenever people bring this up I find it somewhat silly.
| Wine originally stood for "Windows Emulator". See old
| release notes ( https://lwn.net/1998/1112/wine981108.html )
| for one example: "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS
| Windows emulator." The name change was made for trademark
| and marketing reasons. The maintainers were concerned that
| if the project got good enough to frighten Microsoft, they
| might get sued for having "Windows" in the name. They also
| had to deal with confusion from people such as yourself who
| thought "emulation" automatically meant "software-based,
| interpreted emulation" and therefore that running stuff in
| Wine must have some significant performance penalty. Other
| Windows compatibility solutions like SoftWindows and
| Virtual PC used interpreted emulation and were slow as a
| result, so the Wine maintainers wanted to emphasize that
| Wine could run software just as quickly as the same
| computer running Windows.
|
| Emulation does not mean that the CPU must be interpreted.
| For example, the DOSEMU emulator for Linux from the early
| 90s ran DOS programs natively using the 386's virtual 8086
| mode, and reimplemented the DOS API. This worked similarly
| to Microsoft's Virtual DOS Machine on Windows NT. For a
| more recent example, the ShadPS4 PS4 emulator runs the game
| code natively on your amd64 CPU and reimplements the PS4
| API in the emulator source code for
| graphics/audio/input/etc calls.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Sure, you can call it an emulator in that sense but how
| does that imply anything at all about performance? That
| is what I was responding to.
| chungy wrote:
| The problem is the word "emulator" itself. It's a very
| flexible word in English, but when applied to computing,
| it very often implies emulating foreign hardware in
| software, which is always going to be slow. Wine doesn't
| do that and was wise to step away from the connotations.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Traditionally WINE uses QEMU on Apple Silicon to execute
| x86 binaries on an ARM CPU, so while I'm aware WINE Is No
| an Emulator there's likely emulation happening in a lot of
| cases.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I would vote for Delphi/FreePascal, but share the sentiment.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Lua
| pjmlp wrote:
| Performance?
| Etheryte wrote:
| If there was sufficient interest in it, most performance
| issues could be solved. Look at Python or Javascript, big
| companies have financial interest in it so they've poured
| an insane amount of capital into making them faster.
| vips7L wrote:
| Isn't python still the slowest mainstream language?
| Etheryte wrote:
| Being slower than other mainstream languages isn't really
| a problem in and of itself if it's fast enough to get the
| job done. Looking at all the ML and LLM work that's done
| in Python, I would say it is fast enough to get things
| done.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| As pointed out already, most of that uses C code or GPU
| code to do the work and not slow Python code.
| chungy wrote:
| No. Ruby exists.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Ruby is now faster than Python, last I saw a comparison,
| though it used to be the other way around.
| Rochus wrote:
| Do you think that "most performance issues" in Python are
| solved?
| kh_hk wrote:
| LuaJIT can be extremely fast
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I only had limited exposure to Delphi, but from what I
| experienced, it's big thumbs-up.
|
| But if you liked that, consider that C# was in many ways a
| spiritual successor to Delphi, and MS still supports native
| GUI development with it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except on the AOT experience and low level programming,
| which only started to be taken seriously during the last
| five years.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Only if I don't need to do anything beyond the built-in widgets
| and effects of Win32. If I need to do anything beyond that then
| I don't see me being more productive than if I were using a
| mature, well documented and actively maintained application
| runtime like the Web.
| jlarocco wrote:
| That's not really true. Even in the 90s there were large
| libraries of 3rd party widgets available for Windows that
| could be drag-and-dropped into VB, Delphi, and even the
| Visual C++ UI editor. For tasks running the gamut from 3D
| graphics to interfacing with custom hardware.
|
| The web was a big step backwards for UI design. It was a 30
| year detour whose results still suck compared to pre-web UIs.
| bobajeff wrote:
| That sounds nice. I agree, not having a UI editor making
| apps is a step back. However, you seem to be discussing
| mostly in past tense.
|
| Maybe one day something like Lazarus or Avalonia would
| catch up but today I feel that Electron is best at what it
| does.
| andsoitis wrote:
| I would pick Delphi (with which you can build Windows, Linux,
| macOS, Android, and iOS apps -
| https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi)
|
| Alternatively, RemObjects makes Elements, also a RAD
| programming environment in which you can code in Oxygene (their
| Object Pascal), C#, Swift, Java, Go, or Mercury (VB) and target
| all platforms: .Net, iOS and macOS, Android, WebAssemblyl,
| Java, Linux, Windows.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Alternatively, RemObjects makes Elements, also a RAD
| programming environment in which you can code in Oxygene
| (their Object Pascal), C#, Swift, Java, Go, or Mercury (VB)
| and target all platforms: .Net, iOS and macOS, Android,
| WebAssemblyl, Java, Linux, Windows.
|
| Wait you can make Android applications with Golang without
| too much sorcery??
|
| I just wanted to convert some Golang CLI applications to
| GUI's for Android and I instead ended up giving up on the
| project and just started recommending people to use termux.
|
| Please tell me if there is a simple method for Golang which
| can "just work" for basically being the Visualbasic-alike
| glue code to just glue CLI and GUI mostly.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Wait you can make Android applications with Golang
| without too much sorcery??
|
| Why don't you try it out:
| https://www.remobjects.com/elements/gold/
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| It's really price-y and I am not sure about if I could
| create applications for f-droid if they aren't open
| source and how it might go with something like
| remobjects.com/gold/
|
| One of the key principles of f-droid is that it must be
| reproducible (I think) or open source with it being able
| to be built by f-droid servers but I suppose
| reproducibility must require having this software which
| is paid in this case.
| dardeaup wrote:
| Yes, you can build cross-platform GUI apps with Delphi.
| However, that requires using Firemonkey (FMX). If you build a
| GUI app using VCL on Delphi, it's limited to Windows. If you
| build an app with Lazarus and LCL, you CAN have it work
| cross-platform.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I thought the point was that Windows apps will run on Linux
| under Wine (and macOS?) so using VCL is a cross-platform
| GUI development environment.
| chungy wrote:
| You might as well use Lazarus and LCL. It'll give the
| best of all worlds.
| dardeaup wrote:
| I made the clarification because the comment I replied to
| mentioned Android, iOS, and macOS. There are many who
| used Delphi before FMX appeared and I thought it would be
| helpful to point out that VCL only makes Windows
| executables.
| danabramov wrote:
| 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 native UI frameworks have a
| similar model these days.
| josephg wrote:
| > and why all modern native UI frameworks have a similar
| model these days.
|
| Personally I much rather the approach taken by solidjs /
| svelte.
|
| React's approach is very inefficient - the entire view tree
| is rerendered when any change happens. Then they need to diff
| the new UI state with the old state and do reconciliation.
| This works well enough for tiny examples, but it's clunky at
| scale. And the code to do diffing and reconciliation is
| insanely complicated. Hello world in react is like 200kb of
| javascript or something like that. (Smaller gzipped, but the
| browser still needs to parse it all at startup). And all of
| that diffing is also pure overhead. It's simply not needed.
|
| The solidjs / react model uses the compiler to figure out how
| variables changing results in changes to the rendered view
| tree. Those variables are wrapped up as "observed state". As
| a result, you can just update those variables and exactly and
| only the parts of the UI that need to be changed will be
| redrawn. No overrendering. No diffing. No virtual Dom and no
| reconciliation. Hello world in solid or svelte is minuscule -
| 2kb or something.
|
| Unfortunately, swiftui has copied react. And not the superior
| approach of newer libraries.
|
| The rust "Leptos" library implements this same fine grained
| reactivity, but it's still married to the web. I'm really
| hoping someone takes the same idea and ports it to desktop /
| native UI.
| steve1977 wrote:
| And more performant. Software written for 2005 Windows runs
| super fast on todays systems.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Sometimes 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!
| zzo38computer wrote:
| If it is made to allow C codes to be combined with VB6 codes
| easily, and a FOSS version of VB6 (and the other components it
| might use) is made available on ReactOS (and Wine, and it would
| also run on Windows as well), then it might be better than
| using web technologies (and is probably better is a lot of
| ways). (There are still many problems with it, although it
| would avoid many problems too.)
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Technically 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| What cool stuff do you run?
| znpy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I've also had the same thought...
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| I'm in if this is happening
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Xfce already exists and has less impedance mismatch. It's
| almost as good in some ways, probably better in a few tiny
| ones.
| andrewf wrote:
| Starting with FreeBSD might be easier than starting with Debian
| then removing all the GNUisms. But perhaps not as much Type II
| fun.
| tssva wrote:
| Using Linux gets you much more hardware compatibility
| especially for the consumer desktop and laptop systems this is
| targeted towards.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I mean... isn't that just X11 light compositor (like IceWM) with
| binfmt enabled?
| oybng wrote:
| It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most
| functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible
| then simply threw it away
| hypeatei wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Do you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?
| hypeatei wrote:
| Yes. 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 wrote:
| Enterprise 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
| zppln wrote:
| I'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete
| disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as
| right-clicking a slow operation.
|
| I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got
| through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved
| to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.
| materialpoint wrote:
| The problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads,
| it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most
| mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly
| features, that are still present in enterprise versions.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| Start menu search requires 7 web browser processes that
| consume ~350 MB of RAM to be constantly running.
| bnastic wrote:
| Everything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Windows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler was
| fully in charge of Windows.
|
| Things started going downhill after that.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| XP was arguably better.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 7 was pretty good. But I may be looking through the glasses
| of nostalgia and my love for the frutiger aero style
| 63282836292919 wrote:
| In my day job, Explorer still freezes every second day, GUI
| interactions take several seconds and the sidebar is full of
| tabloid headlines and ads.
| layer8 wrote:
| At least with regard to the last point, your enterprise
| admins must be doing a bad job.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
| Ygg2 wrote:
| It's functional - yes, intuitive - maybe, but optimized is
| highly debatable.
|
| The answer to maintaining a highly functional and stable OS is
| piles and piles of backwards compatibility misery on the devs.
|
| You want Windows 9? Sorry, some code checks the string for
| Windows 9 to determine if the OS is Windows 95 or 98.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| He was talking about user interface not app compatibility
| Ygg2 wrote:
| He's mentioning Desktop environment, I assume he means all
| the parts, not just UI.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Millions of total computer noobs hit the ground running with
| Windows 95. It was a great achievement in software design.
| qcnguy wrote:
| The pivot point was Windows 95.
|
| Competition. In the first half of the 90s Windows faced a lot
| more of it. Then they didn't, and standards slipped. Why invest
| in Windows when people will buy it anyway?
|
| Upgrades. In the first half of the 90s Windows was mostly
| software bought by PC users directly, rather than getting it
| with the hardware. So, if you could make Windows 95 run in 4mb
| of RAM rather than 8mb of RAM, you'd make way more sales on
| release day. As the industry matured, this model disappeared in
| favor of one where users got the OS with their hardware
| purchase and rarely bought upgrades, then never bought them,
| then never even upgraded when offered them for free. This
| inverted the incentive to optimize because now the customer was
| the OEMs, not the end user. Not optimizing as aggressively
| naturally came out of that because the only new sales of
| Windows would be on new machines with the newest specs, and
| OEMs wanted MS to give users reasons to buy new hardware
| anyway.
|
| UI testing. In the 1990s the desktop GUI paradigm was new and
| Apple's competitive advantage was UI quality, so Microsoft ran
| lots of usability studies to figure out what worked. It wasn't
| a cultural problem because most UI was designed by programmers
| who freely admitted they didn't really know what worked. The
| reason the start button had "Start" written on it was because
| of these tests. After Windows 95 the culture of usability
| studies disappeared, as they might imply that the professional
| designers didn't know what they were doing, and those designers
| came to compete on looks. Also it just got a lot harder to
| change the basic desktop UI designs anyway.
|
| The web. When people mostly wrote Windows apps, investing in
| Windows itself made sense. Once everyone migrated to web apps
| it made much less sense. Data is no longer stored in files
| locally so making Explorer more powerful doesn't help, it makes
| more sense to simplify it. There's no longer any concept of a
| Windows app so adding new APIs is low ROI outside of gaming, as
| the only consumer is the browser. As a consequence all the
| people with ambition abandoned the Windows team to work on web-
| related stuff like Azure, where you could have actual impact.
| The 90s Windows/MacOS teams were full of people thinking big
| thoughts about how to write better software hence stuff like
| DCOM, OpenDoc, QuickTime, DirectMusic and so on. The
| overwhelming preference of developers for making websites
| regardless of the preferences of the users meant developing new
| OS ideas was a waste of time; browsers would not expose these
| features, so devs wouldn't use them, so apps wouldn't require
| them, so users would buy new computers to get access to them.
|
| And that's why MS threw Windows away. It simply isn't a
| valuable asset anymore.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It's quite common for a company to build a good product and
| then once the initial wave of ICs and management moves on, the
| next waves of employees either don't understand what they're
| maintaining or simply don't care because they see a chance to
| extract short term gains from the built-up intellectual capital
| others generated.
| glitchc wrote:
| Piracy. The consumer versions are filled with ads because most
| people don't pay for them.
| charlie-83 wrote:
| Is this really the case? I feel like most windows users just
| bought a laptop with Windows already on it. Even if all home
| users were running pirated versions they would still become
| entrenched in the world of Windows/Office which would then
| lead to enterprise sales.
| glitchc wrote:
| > Is this really the case? I feel like most windows users
| just bought a laptop with Windows already on it.
|
| This is largely true in North America, UK and AUS/NZ, less
| true in Europe, a mixed bag in the Middle East and mostly
| untrue everywhere else.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| If you were able to wave a magic wand today and remove
| piracy, Microsoft would not remove ads.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Idk why they use Electron for everything, they literally built
| the UI stack itself and C# is insanely good at building UIs if
| they stop trying to reinvent UIs in C# that is.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thus 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| While 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 wrote:
| FWIW, Wine 8.0 introduced some WinRT support, specifically
| Windows.Gaming.Input.
|
| It's a start.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Damn, they didn't miss a spot to add a Loss comic reference.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel)
| Lutzb wrote:
| Thank you. I was contemplating the logo but my brain could not
| make the connection.
| tosti wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Free 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Stable 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 wrote:
| Agreed... 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| We exist in a world where proprietary software exists, and
| always will exist. I want to be able to run said software if
| it's the best tool for the job, not be hobbled by an idealistic
| stance of "all software should be free so we don't bother to
| support proprietary software".
| tosti wrote:
| Then you are quite simply part of the problem.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Crazy 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 wrote:
| Wine works on windows too. It's used by the shorthorn project
| to get software for newer versions of windows to run under XP.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Yep, for some games like Elden Ring it even fixes Windows-
| specific performance hiccups: https://youtu.be/vAooLiCy7rE
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Anything 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.
| tubs wrote:
| Isn't this because the wine db has those tweaks pre
| configured?
| Xirdus wrote:
| Windows used to be half operating system, half
| preconfigured compatibility tweaks for all kinds of
| applications. That's how it kept its backwards
| compatibility.
| shakna wrote:
| More a case of DirectX radically changing how it worked
| [0].
|
| [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/direct3darti...
| realusername wrote:
| It's because wine OS selector actually tries to match bug
| for bug the OS version you set but Window's one gave up
| after Windows 7.
| sgarland wrote:
| The last time I tried to run Tachyon: The Fringe was Windows
| 10, and it failed. IIRC I could launch it and play, but there
| was a non-zero chance that a FMV cutscene would cause it to
| freeze.
|
| I see there are guides on Steam forums on how to get it to
| run under Windows 11 [0], and they are quite involved for
| someone not overly familiar with computers outside of gaming.
|
| 0: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=293
| 44...
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| Pretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these
| days that only community made patches can mitigate.
|
| A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never
| spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it
| due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the
| recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's
| interested, you can read the investigation on it here:
| https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-
| andreas...
| robotnikman wrote:
| I remember seeing a thread about that bug here on HN a
| while ago, that was a fun read.
| xtracto wrote:
| Lemmings Revolutions. Apparently to run in something else
| that is not Windows 95/98/Me requires some unofficial .EXE
| patch that you could download from some shady website. The
| file is now nowehre to be found.
|
| It's a great game, unfortunately right now I am not able to
| play it anymore :( even though I have the original CD.
|
| Unfortunately, Wine is of no help here :(
|
| Also original Commandos games.
| Verdex wrote:
| My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the
| first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant
| improvement in experience.
|
| Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen
| different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a
| licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a
| crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult.
|
| Everything just works on Linux except some games on proton have
| some sound issues that I still need to work out.
| wffurr wrote:
| >> some sound issues
|
| Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is
| sound so hard?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't
| get through any native application, nor some games run with
| proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't
| bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth
| headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio
| fidelity.
| xobs wrote:
| If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating.
| This is usually due to an underrun from the game
| requesting an audio quantum that's too low.
|
| The fix is: mkdir -p
| ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d && echo
| "context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum = 1024}"
| | tee ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf
|
| Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it
| defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.
| bmicraft wrote:
| To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's
| not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.
| Verdex wrote:
| Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running
| Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then
| come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some
| systems.
| xtracto wrote:
| Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi
| are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.
|
| As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.
|
| It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual
| machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware
| quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way
| beyond anything else in the market.
| ndiddy wrote:
| I think the situation has flipped in the past few years.
| Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with
| audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-
| digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse,
| especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I
| get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.
| josephg wrote:
| Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve
| on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to
| make audio work. And I can't record sound within resolve
| at all.
|
| It doesn't help that they only officially support rocky
| Linux. I use mint. I assume there's some magic pipewire /
| alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue
| everything together properly. But I can't figure it out.
| It just seems so complicated.
| nine_k wrote:
| This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific
| to your particular sound chip / card.
|
| Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly
| wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth
| mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back
| on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux
| machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver
| saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.
|
| Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have
| bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux
| or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher
| prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter,
| but not empty.
| josephg wrote:
| That's possible, but the hardware (a rodecaster pro 2
| connected over usb) works just fine in other Linux apps.
| I can record audio in audacity. And I can play back audio
| in resolve. I just can't record audio in resolve.
|
| I think it's a software issue in how resolve uses the
| Linux audio stack. But I have no idea how to get started
| debugging it. I've never had any problems with the same
| hardware in windows, or the same software (resolve) on
| macOS.
| vablings wrote:
| Pipewire + lowlatency kernel fixes 99% sound issues
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| The problem is games over Wine/Proton doing weird things
| with the sound. Not the sound itself on modern Linux. Heck,
| I have less issues using audio stuff, or just changing the
| audio volume on Linux than on the crappy Windows.
| mainde wrote:
| It kinda works both ways, just yesterday I tried to play the
| Linux native version of 8bit.runner and it didn't work, I had
| to install the Windows (beta) version and run it through
| proton.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Funny story: I use Anki (the flashcard program), and I run it
| on my NixOS laptop. There is a NixOS/nixpkgs package for
| Anki. It doesn't work. You know how I run Anki, which has a
| native GNU/Linux version and even an actual nixpkgs package,
| on my GNU/Linux NixOS laptop? Yeah, I run AnkiDroid, the
| Android version, through Waydroid. Because the Android
| version works.
| lametti wrote:
| Anki seems to be a habitual offender, I was never able to
| install it reproducibly and in an obvious way on several
| distros and always ended up building it from source.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Yea! 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Linux 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 wrote:
| There really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system,
| proportionately.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Exactly, Gnome/Linux or KDE/Linux would make a lot more
| sense.
| graemep wrote:
| Except 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 wrote:
| Sure, although every distro has a default.
|
| systemd/Linux maybe? Lots of things are more significant
| than GNU, either way.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific
| literature OS == kernel, nothing else
|
| No, the academic literature makes the difference between the
| kernel and the OS as a whole. The OS is meant to provide
| hardware abstractions to both developers _and_ the user. The
| Linux world shrugged and said 'okay, this is just the kernel
| for us, everyone else be damned'. In this view Linux is the
| complete outlier, because every other commercial OS comes
| with a full suite of user-mode libraries and applications.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| I think there's a quote from Linus himself saying this.
| senfiaj wrote:
| This 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
| duped wrote:
| It's really just glibc
| amelius wrote:
| Can't we just freeze glibc, at least from an API version
| perspective?
| boredatoms wrote:
| Or just pre-install all the versions on each distro and
| pick the right one at load-time
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| We definitely can, because almost every other POSIX libc
| doesn't have symbol versioning (or MSVC-style multi-version
| support). It's not like the behavior of "open" changes
| radically all the time, and you need to know exactly what
| source symbol it linked against. It's really just an
| artifact of decisions from decades ago, and the cure is way
| worse than the disease.
| duped wrote:
| The problem is not the APIs, it's symbol versions. You will
| routinely get loader errors when running software compiled
| against a newer glibc than what a system provides, even if
| the caller does not use any "new" APIs.
|
| glibc-based toolchains are ultimately missing a
| GLIBC_MIN_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET definition that gets passed to
| the linker so it knows which minimum version of glibc your
| software supports, similar to how Apple's toolchain lets
| you target older MacOS from a newer toolchain.
| Y_Y wrote:
| In principle you can patch your binary to accept the old
| local version, though I don't remember ever getting it to
| work right. Anyway here it is for the brave or foolhardy,
| here's the gist: patchelf --set-
| interpreter /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 "$APP"
| patchelf --set-rpath /lib "$APP"
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, so that's why freezing the glibc symbol versions
| would help. If everybody uses the same version, you
| cannot get conflicts (at least after it has rippled
| through and everybody is on the same version). The
| downside is that we can't add anything new to glibc, but
| I'd say given all the trouble it produces, that's worth
| accepting. We can still add bugfixes and security fixes
| to glibc, we just don't change the APIs of the symbols.
| uecker wrote:
| It should not be necessary to freeze it. glibc is already
| extremely backwards compatible. The problem is people
| distributing programs that request the newest version
| even though they do not really require it, and this then
| fails on systems having an older version. At least this
| is my understanding.
|
| The actual practical problem is not glibc but the
| constant GUI / desktop API changes.
| qcnguy wrote:
| It's really just not. GTK is on its fourth major version.
| Wayland broke backwards compatibility with tons of apps.
| dadoum wrote:
| GTK update schedule is very slow, and you can run multiple
| major versions of GTK on the same computer, it's not the
| right argument. When people says GTK backwards
| compatibility is bad, they are referring in particular to
| its breaking changes between minor versions. It was common
| for themes and apps to break (or work differently) between
| minor versions of GTK+ 3, as deprecations were sometimes
| accompanied with the breaking of the deprecated code.
| (anyway, before Wayland support became important people
| stuck to GTK+ 2 which was simple, stable, and still
| supported at the time; and everyone had it installed on
| their computer alongside GTK+ 3).
|
| Breaking between major versions is annoying (2 to 3, 3 to
| 4), but for the most part it's renaming work and some
| slight API modifications, reminiscent of the Python 2 to 3
| switch, and it only happened twice since 2000.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The difference is that you can statically link GTK+, and
| it'll work. You can't statically link glibc, if you want to
| be able to resolve hostnames or users, because of NSS
| modules.
| viraptor wrote:
| Static linking itself doesn't prevent modules. There's
| https://github.com/pikhq/musl-nscd for example
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Not inherently, but static linking to glibc will not get
| you there without substantial additional effort, and
| static linking to a non-glibc C library will by default
| get you an absence of NSS.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| 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.
| realusername wrote:
| Not sure if it's the right solution but it's a
| description of what happens right now in practice yes.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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. And to get anything to run reliably on 95 of them
| you need to be extremely competent.
|
| Distribution as source fails because there are too many
| unknown, and dependent parts.
|
| Distribution as binary containers (Docker et al) are
| popular because it gives the app a fighting chance. While
| at the same time being a really ugly hack.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. But docker doesn't help you with desktop apps. And
| everything becomes so big!
|
| I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just
| statically link everything wherever possible. These days
| I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong
| for users.
|
| People don't seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable,
| so long as it actually works.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I am not an expert on this, but my question is, how does
| windows manages to achieve it? Why can't Linux do the
| same?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But
| from a user's perspective, I do want a distro to package
| as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do
| with user freedom. It's all about being entitled as a
| user to have the world's software conveniently packaged.
| Rohansi wrote:
| 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.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Even open-source software has to deal with the moving
| target that is ABI _and_ API compatibility on Linux.
| OpenSSL's API versioning is a nightmare, for example, and
| it's the most critical piece of software to dynamically
| link (and almost everything needs a crypto /SSL library).
|
| Stable ABIs for certain critical pieces of independently-
| updatable software (libc, OpenSSL, etc.) is not even that
| big of a lift or a hard tradeoff. I've never run into any
| issues with macOS's libc because it doesn't version the
| symbol for fopen like glibc does. It just requires
| commitment and forethought.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| Everyone is mentioning ABI, but this is really an API
| problem, so "you only need API compatibility at that point"
| is a very big understatement.
| SvenL wrote:
| Yes and even the package format thing is a hell of its own.
| Even on Ubuntu you have multiple package formats and
| sometimes there are even multiple app stores (a Gnome one and
| an Ubuntu specific if I remember correctly)
| Propelloni wrote:
| You can also run a WinXP exe on any Linux distribution almost
| every time. That's the point of project and Linus' quip: The
| only stable ABI around on MS Windows and Linux is Win32 (BTW,
| I do not agree with this.)
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I think it's not unlikely that we reach reach a point in a
| couple of decades where we are all developing win32 apps
| that most people are running some form of linux.
|
| We already have an entire platform like that (steam deck),
| and it's the best linux development experience around in my
| opinion.
| dralley wrote:
| While true in many respects (still), it's worth pointing out
| that this take is 12 years old.
| senfiaj wrote:
| Maybe it's better now in some distros. Not sure about other
| distros, but I don't like Ubuntu's Snap package. Snap
| packages typically start slower, use more RAM, require sudo
| privileges to install, and run in an isolated environment
| only on systems with AppArmour. Snap also tends to slow
| things some at boot and shutdown. People report issues like
| theming mismatches, permissions/file-access friction. Firefox
| theming complaints are a common example. It's almost like
| running a docker container for each application. Flatpaks
| seem slightly better, but still a bandaid. Just nobody is
| going to fix the compatibility problems in Linux.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Ubuntu was getting too good so it had to snap half of its
| value out of existence.
|
| You can still get firefox as a .deb though.
|
| https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
| josephg wrote:
| I think he still considers this to be the case. He was
| interviewed on Linus tech tips recently. And he bemoaned in
| passing the terrible application ecosystem on Linux.
|
| It makes sense. Every distribution wants to be in charge of
| what set of libraries are available on their platform. And
| they all have their own way to manage software. Developing
| applications on Linux that can be widely used across
| distributions is way more complex than it needs to be. I can
| just ship a binary for windows and macOS. For Linux, you need
| an rpm and a dpkg and so on.
|
| I use davinci resolve on Linux. The resolve developers only
| officially support Rocky Linux because anything else is too
| hard. I use it in Linux mint anyway. The application has no
| title bar and recording audio doesn't work properly. Bleh.
| ori_b wrote:
| To quote a friend; "Glibc is a waste of a perfectly good stable
| kernel ABI"
| microtonal wrote:
| At least glibc uses versioned symbols. Hundreds of other
| widely-used open source libraries don't.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Versioned glibc symbols are part of the reason that
| binaries aren't portable across Linux distributions and
| time.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| 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.
| ok123456 wrote:
| If it requires effort to be correct, that's a bad design.
|
| Why doesn't the glibc use the version tag to do the
| appropriate mapping?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I think even calling it a "design" is dubious. It's an
| attribute of these systems that arose out of the
| circumstance, nobody ever sat down and said it should be
| this way. Even Torvalds complaining about it doesn't mean
| it gets fixed, it's not analogous to Steve Jobs
| complaining about a thing because Torvalds is only in
| charge of one piece of the puzzle, and the whole image
| that emerges from all these different groups only loosely
| collaborating with each other isn't going to be anybody's
| ideal.
|
| In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar,
| not Cathedral.
| afishhh wrote:
| > Hundreds of other widely-used open source libraries
| don't.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think versioned symbols
| are a thing on Windows (i.e. they are non-portable). This
| is not a problem for glibc but it is very much a problem
| for a lot of open source libraries (which instead tend to
| just provide a stable C ABI if they care).
| derefr wrote:
| Kind of funny to realize, the _NT_ kernel ABI isn't even all
| that stable itself; it is just wrapped in a set of very
| stable userland exposures (Win32, UWP, etc.), and it's those
| exposures that Windows executables are relying on. A
| theoretical Windows PE binary that was 100% statically linked
| (and so directly contained NT syscalls) wouldn't be at-all
| portable between different Windows versions.
|
| Linux with glibc is the complete opposite; there really does
| exist old Linux software that static-links in everything down
| to libc, just interacting with the kernel through syscalls--
| and it _does_ (almost always) still work to run such software
| on a modern Linux, even when the software is 10-20 years old.
|
| I guess this is why Linux containers are such a thing: you're
| taking a dynamically-linked Linux binary and pinning it to a
| particular entire userland, such that when you run the old
| software, it calls into the old glibc. Containers work,
| because they ultimately ground out in the same set of stable
| kernel ABI calls.
|
| (Which, now that I think of it, makes me wonder how exactly
| Windows containers work. I'm guessing each one brings its own
| NTOSKRNL, that gets spun up under HyperV if the host kernel
| ABI doesn't match the guest?)
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Docker on windows isn't simply a glorified virtual machine
| running a Linux. aka Linux subsystem v2
| senfiaj wrote:
| > Kind of funny to realize, the NT kernel ABI isn't even
| all that stable itself
|
| This is not a big problem if it's hard/unlikely enough to
| write a code that accidentally relies on raw syscalls. At
| least MS's dev tooling doesn't provide an easy way to
| bypass the standard DLLs.
|
| > makes me wonder how exactly Windows containers work
|
| I guess containers do the syscalls through the standard
| Windows DLLs like any regular userspace application. If
| it's a Linux container on Windows, probably the WSL
| syscalls, which I guess, are stable.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Apparently there are 3 kinds of Windows containers, one
| using HyperV, and the others sharing the kernel (like Linux
| containers)
|
| https://thomasvanlaere.com/posts/2021/06/exploring-
| windows-c...
| easton wrote:
| IIRC, Windows containers require that the container be
| built with a base image that matches the host for it to
| work at all (like, the exact build of Windows has to
| match). Guessing that's how they get a 'stable ABI'.
|
| ...actually, looks like it's a bit looser these days.
| Version matrix incoming: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/virtualization/windowscont...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Ask your friend if he would CC0 the quote or similar (not
| sure if its possible but like) I can imagine this being a
| quote on t-shirts xD
|
| Honestly I might buy a T-shirt with such a quote.
|
| I think glibc is such a pain that it is the reason why we
| have so vastly different package management and I feel like
| non glibc things really would simplify the package management
| approach to linux which although feels solved, there are
| definitely still issues with the approach and I think we
| should still all definitely as such look for ways to solve
| the problem
| BirAdam wrote:
| AppImage, theoretically, solves this problem (or FlatPak I
| guess). The issue would really be in getting people to package
| up dead/abandoned software.
| scrivanodev wrote:
| I can only speak for Flatpak, but I found its packaging
| workflow and restricted runtime terrible to work with. Lots
| of undocumented/hard to find behaviour and very painful to
| integrate with existing package managers (e.g. vcpkg).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, flatpak has some good ideas, and they're even mostly
| well executed, but once you start trying to build your own
| flatpaks or look under the hood there's a lot of "magic".
| (Examples: Where do runtimes come from? I couldn't find any
| docs other than a note that says to not worry about it
| because you should never ever try to make your own, and I
| couldn't even figure out the git repos that appear to
| create the official ones. How do you build software? Well,
| mostly you plug it into the existing buildsystems and hope
| that works, though I mostly resorted to `buildsystem:
| simple` and doing it by hand.) For bonus points, I'm
| _pretty_ sure 1. flatpaks are actually pretty conceptually
| simple; the whole base is in /usr and the whole app is in
| /app and that's it, and 2. the whole thing _could_ have
| been a thin wrapper over docker /podman like x11docker
| taken in a slightly different direction.
| exceptione wrote:
| You can build your own flatpak by wrapping bwrap, because
| that is what Flatpak does. Flatpak seems to have some
| "convenience things" like the various *-SDK packages, but
| I don't know how much convenience that provides.
|
| The flatpak ecosystem is problematic in that most
| packages are granted too much rights by default.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://zapps.app/ is another interesting thing in the space.
|
| AppImage have some issues/restrictions like it cant run on
| older linux than one it was compiled on, so people compile it
| on the oldest pc's and a little bit of more quirks
|
| AppImage are really good but zapps are good too, I had once
| tried to do something on top of zapp but shame that zapp went
| into the route of crypto ipfs or smth and then I don't really
| see any development of that now but it would be interesting
| if someone can add the features of zapp perhaps into appimage
| or pick up the project and build something similar perhaps.
| freedomben wrote:
| Interesting. I've had a hell of a time building AppImages
| for my apps that work on Fedora 43. I've found bug reports
| of people with similar challenges, but it's bizarre because
| I use plenty of AppImages on F43 that work fine. I wonder
| if this might be a clue
| bobajeff wrote:
| This is really cool. Looks like it has a way for me to use
| my own dynamic linker and glibc version *.
|
| At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be
| nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into a
| zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages today).
|
| * https://github.com/warptools/ldshim
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be
| nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into
| a zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages
| today).
|
| Looks like you met the right guy because I have built
| this tool :)
|
| Allow me to show my project, Appseed
| (https://nanotimestamps.org/appseed): It's a simple fish
| script which I had (prototyped with Claude) some 8-10
| months ago I guess to solve exactly this.
|
| I have a youtube video in the website and the repository
| is open source on github too.
|
| So this actually worked fantastic for a lot of different
| binaries that I tested it on and I had uploaded it on
| hackernews as well but nobody really responded, perhaps
| this might change it :p
|
| Now what appseed does is that you can think of it is that
| it can take a binary and convert it into two folders (one
| is the dynamic library part) and the other is the binary
| itself
|
| So you can then use something like tar to package it up
| and run it anywhere. I can of course create it into a
| single elf-64 as well but I wanted to make it more
| flexible so that we can have more dynamic library like or
| perhaps caching or just some other ideas and this made
| things simple for me too
|
| Ldshim is really good idea too although I think I am
| unable to understand it for the time being but I will try
| to understand it I suppose. I would really appreciate it
| if you can tell me more about Ldshim! Perhaps take a look
| at Appseed too and I think that there might be some
| similarities except I tried to just create a fish script
| which can just convert any dynamic binary usually into a
| static one of sorts
|
| I just want more people to take ideas like appseed or
| zapp's and run with it to make linux's ecosystem better
| man. Because I just prototyped it with LLM's to see if it
| was possible or not since I don't have much expertise in
| the area. So I can only imagine what can be possible if
| people who have expertise do something about it and this
| was why I shared it originally/created it I guess.
|
| Let me know if you are interested in discussing anything
| about appseed. My memory's a little rusty about how it
| worked but I would love to talk about it if I can be of
| any help :p
|
| Have a nice new year man! :p
| ogogmad wrote:
| 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 users, access privileges,
|
| haven't changed since 1970, and the more modern GUI stuff
| hasn't changed since at least the early '90s. Some design
| elements, like tree-like file systems, WIMP
| GUIs, per-user privileges, the fuzziness of what an
| "operating system" even is and its role,
|
| are perhaps even arbitrary, but can serve as a mature
| foundation for better-concieved ideas, such as:
| ZFS (which implements in a very well-engineered manner a tree-
| like data storage that's been standard since the '60s)
| can serve as a founation for Postgres (which implements a
| better-conceived relational design)
|
| I'm wondering why OSS - which according to one of its acolytes,
| makes all bugs shallow - couldn't make its flagship OS more
| stable and boring. It's produced an anarchy of
| packaging systems, breaking upgrades and updates,
| unstable glibc, desktop environments that are different and
| changing seemingly for the sake of it, sound that's kept
| breaking, power management iffiness, etc.
| josephg wrote:
| I like FreeBSD for the same reason. The whole system is sane
| and coherent. Illumos is the same.
|
| I wish either of those systems had the same hardware &
| software support. I'd swap my desktop over in a heartbeat if
| I could.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Isn't the kernel responsible for the ABI?
| surajrmal wrote:
| ABI is a far larger concept than the kernel UAPI. Remember
| that the OS includes a lot of things in userspace as well.
| Many of these things are not even stable between the various
| contemporary Linux distros, let alone older versions of them.
| This might include dbus services, fs layout, window manager
| integration, and all sorts of other things.
| fragmede wrote:
| What's interesting to think about is Conway's law and monorepos
| and the Linux kernel and userland. If it were all just one big
| repo, then making breaking changes, wouldn't. The whole
| ifconfig > ip debacle is an example of where one giant monorepo
| would have changed how things happened.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Android makes a sport of breaking ABI compatibly and it hasn't
| stopped it from being the most popular mobile OS
| pjmlp wrote:
| The reason being JetPack libraries that abstract what Android
| version is being used.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Server 2003 was the last release supervised by Cutler, so would
| have my vote. It's even source-available... technically.
| PTOB wrote:
| > 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."
| haunter wrote:
| Reference to the famous "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux"
| post
|
| https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
| apexalpha wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Can 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 wrote:
| You never ran into a GLIBC version problem?
| muth02446 wrote:
| Wasn'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 wrote:
| Unfortunately 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 ;)
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > we don't break user space
|
| The kernel doesn't break user space. User space breaks on
| its own.
| qcnguy wrote:
| The model of patching+recompiling the world for every OS
| release is a terrible hack that devs hate and that users hate.
| 99% of all people hate it because it's a crap model. Devs hate
| middlemen who silently fuck up their software and leave
| upstream with the mess, users hate being restricted to whatever
| software was cool and current two years ago. If they use a
| rolling distro, they hate the constant brokenness that comes
| with it. Of the 1% of people who don't hate this situation 99%
| of those merely tolerate it, and the rest are Debian developers
| who are blinded by ideology and sunk costs.
|
| Good operating systems should:
|
| 1. Allow users to obtain software from anywhere.
|
| 2. Execute all programs that were written for previous versions
| reliably.
|
| 3. Not insert themselves as middlemen into user/developer
| transactions.
|
| Judged from this perspective, Windows is a good OS. It doesn't
| nail all three all the time, but it gets the closest. Linux is
| a bad OS.
|
| The answers to your questions are:
|
| (1) It isn't backwards compatible for sophisticated GUI apps.
| Core APIs like the widget toolkits change their API all the
| time (GTK 1->2->3->4, Qt also does this). It's also not
| forwards compatible. Compiling the same program on a new
| release may yield binaries that don't run on an old release.
| Linux library authors don't consider this a problem,
| Microsoft/Apple/everyone else does. This is the origin of the
| glibc symbol versioning errors everyone experiences sometimes.
|
| (2) Maintaining a stable API/ABI is not fun and requires a
| capitalist who says "keep app X working or else I'll fire you".
| The capitalist Fights For The User. Linux is a
| socialist/collectivist project with nobody playing this role.
| Distros like Red Hat clone the software ecosystem into a
| private space that's semi-capitalist again, and do offer stable
| ABIs, but their releases are just ecosystem forks and the wider
| issue remains.
|
| (3) It hasn't change and it's still bad.
|
| (4) Docker: "solves" the problem on servers by shipping the
| entire userspace with every app, and being itself developed by
| a for-profit company. Only works because servers don't need any
| shared services from the computer beyond opening sockets and
| reading/writing files, so the kernel is good enough and the
| kernel _does_ maintain a stable ABI. Docker obviously doesn 't
| help the moment you move outside the server space and
| coordination requirements are larger.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > If they use a rolling distro, they hate the constant
| brokenness that comes with it.
|
| Never happens for me on Arch, which I've run as my primary
| desktop for 15 years.
| aeyes wrote:
| Maybe you are running a desktop environment which never
| changes but Gnome has been constantly broken in many
| different ways for the last 5+ years. At times it felt more
| like a developer playground than a usable desktop
| environment. KDE is more stable nowadays but it still
| breaks in mysterious ways from time to time. I also had
| major issues for some time when Qt6 started rolling out.
|
| And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package
| updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a
| major change to the NVidia driver packaging.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I've been running GNOME. I've never had breakage from
| upgrading. Of course there's the fact that GNOME neutered
| itself, removing many of its own features, but that's a
| different story and has nothing to do with ABIs or
| upgrading.
|
| > And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on
| package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago
| there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.
|
| If you're running a proprietary driver on a 12 year old
| GPU architecture incapable of modern games or AI, yeah...
| so I actually haven't needed to care about many of these.
| Maybe 2 or 3 ever...
| 201984 wrote:
| The kernel is stable, but all the system libraries needed to
| make a grapical application are not. Over the last 20 years,
| we've gone from GTK 2 to 4, X11 to Wayland, Qt 4 to 6, with
| compatibility breakages with each change. Building an
| unmodified 20 year old application from source is very likely
| to not work, running a 20 year old binary even less so.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| Linux API/ABI doesn't cover the entire spectrum that Windows
| API covers. There is everything from lowest level kernel stuff
| to the desktop environment and beyond. In Linux deployments,
| that's achieved by a mix of different libraries from different
| developers and these change over time.
| uecker wrote:
| There is no ABI problem. The problem is a lack of
| standardization for important APIs and infrastructure. There
| once was a serious effort to solve this: the Linux Standard
| Base: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
| Standardization would of course be the only way to fix this,
| instead of inventing even more packaging formats which fragment
| the ecosystem even more. LSB died due to lack of interest. I
| assume also because various industrial stakeholders are more
| interest in gaining a little bit of control over the ecosystem
| than in the overall success of Linux on the desktop. The other
| major problem is that it is no fun to maintain software, which
| leads to what was described as CADT:
| https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html As you see with Wayland and
| Rust rewrites CADT still continues today always justified with
| some bullshit arguments why the rewrites are really necessary.
|
| Together this means that basically nobody implements
| applications anymore. For commercial applications that market
| is too fragmented and it is too much effort. Open-source
| applications need time to grow and if all the underpinnings get
| changed all the time, this is too frustrating. Only a few
| projects survive this, and even those struggle. For example
| GIMP took a decade to be ported from GTK 2 to 3.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Not sure on Windows but with Wine you can totally use Win32 on
| arm.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Valve certainly seems to be making progress on it with
| Proton.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Whatever, at least it can be a desktop alternative to GNOME and
| KDE where you can also run exes.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene
|
| Again?
| esbranson wrote:
| Cool. 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Someone 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 wrote:
| XFCE 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It stuns me that a polished 1:1 2K/XP/7 clone DE (which it
| mimics is a setting) hasn't existed for a 10y+ already. It's
| such an obvious target for a mass appeal Linux desktop that
| many techies and non-techies alike would happily use.
|
| Rough approximations have been possible since the early 2000s,
| but they're exactly that: rough approximations. Details matter,
| and when I boot up an old XP/7 box there are aspects in which
| they feel more polished and... I don't know, finished?
| Complete? Compared to even the big popular DEs like KDE.
|
| Building a DE explicitly as a clone of a specific fixed
| environment would also do wonders to prevent feature creep and
| encourage focus on fixing bugs and optimization instead of
| bells and whistles, which is something that modern software
| across the board could use an Everest sized helping of.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| This is how every open source project GUI feels.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Yea, you raise some good points. Perhaps your comment/this
| discussion can help someone be interested in this. I am
| clearly not educated about DE creation so much but I am sure
| that some people might create this
|
| I think one of the friction could be ideological if not than
| anything since most linux'ers love Open source and hate
| windows so they might not want to build anything which even
| replicates the UI perhaps
|
| Listen I hate windows just as much as the other guy but gotta
| give props that I feel nostalgic to windows 7, and if they
| provide both .exe perfect support and linux binary perfect
| support, things can be really good. I hope somebody does it
| and perhaps even adds it to loss32, would be an interesting
| update.
| layer8 wrote:
| The problems with cloning the exact look is fear of
| copyright/IP issues with Microsoft. You can be pretty sure
| they won't look away if such a desktop becomes really
| popular. Remember how Apple sued Samsung over using rounded
| corners on icons?
| trelane wrote:
| > it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested
| to see how that would pan out.
|
| It would fail, and just be another corpse in the desktop OS
| graveyard.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire
|
| Unless you ship your own hardware or get a vendor to ship your
| OS (see the above), and set up so the user can actually _use_
| it, you have to get users to install it on Windows hardware. So
| now your company is debugging broken consumer hardware without
| the help of the OEM. So that hopefully someone will install it
| on _exactly that configuration_ for free.
|
| This is not a winning business model.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hm I see the confusion, what I was proposed was for something
| like loss32 to have a window manager / desktop environmnet
| which looks like windows 7
|
| Loss32 is itself a linux distro and thus there should
| technically be nothing stopping it from shipping everywhere
|
| I think you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel
| from scratch or something but I am just merely asking a
| loss32 reskin which looks like windows 7 which is definitely
| possible without any of the company debugging consumer
| hardware or even the need of company for that matter I
| suppose considering that I was proposing an open source
| desktop environment which just behaved like windows 7 by
| default as an example.
|
| I don't really understand why we need a winning business
| model out of it, there isn't really a winning model for
| niri,hyprland,sway,kde,xfce,lxqt,gnome etc., they are all
| open source projects who are run with help of donations
|
| There might be a misunderstanding between us but I hope this
| clears up any misunderstanding.
| trelane wrote:
| I think fundamentally I disagree with your optimism. I've
| seen a number of these come and go over the decades. I do
| not think making something that looks like Windows would be
| sufficient to be successful.
|
| > you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel from
| scratch or something
|
| No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is already
| a monumental challenge.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Agreed but there have been some real strides in
| innovation recently in linux, definitely worth checking
| out :)
|
| Regarding successful, well they already are, ZorinOS is
| an OS which looks like windows 7 or has some similarities
| to it and its sort of recommended to beginners but
| usually linux mate is the most recommended distro
|
| > No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is
| already a monumental challenge.
|
| Not sure about this but I ran linux in 15 year old dell
| mini like its no big deal so I can only assume that
| support has been better but I feel like I can assure you
| that linux support is really good for most laptops in my
| observation.
| trelane wrote:
| I am a huge fan and user of Linux.
|
| The problem is slapping Linux on some random bit of
| Windows kit and expecting it to work as though it had
| shipped with Linux, with support to back it. The more
| recent, the worse it will be.
|
| If you want to run Linux, buy Linux computers that ship
| with Linux and have a support number you can call. Just
| like you'd not expect to be able to slap OSX on some
| random Dell and have it work.
| Zen1th wrote:
| You should try KDE with
| https://github.com/ivvil/aerothemeplasma
|
| The screenshots could easily fool me into believing it actually
| is Windows 7 :p
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Damn you got me. I am not a big fan of KDE (Currently using
| Niri) but I can try to use KDE+aerothemeplasma with nixos as
| a dual boot (I already used to have KDE nix as dualboot until
| I accidentally removed that disk and ended up using the
| glorious tool testdisk to save that) so I will try it some
| day thank you!
|
| There is also anduinos which I think doesn't try to replicate
| windows 7 but it definitely tries to look at windows 10
| perhaps 11 iirc
| HeckFeck wrote:
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity is just that, except
| it's a whole OS that's Win2k styled. If it ever gets good
| hardware support it might have a chance.
|
| Or maybe ReactOS - the actual windows clone - gets finished.
| Rumours put a first release date some time after Hurd.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Lol I didn't realize that my joke is actually real
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366998#46368990
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm slowly coming around to it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I absolutely love this. I need a live CD/USB ASAP please!
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Thing 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.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You son of a bitch, im in!
|
| Love this idea. Love where it is coming from.
| pseudony wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Pretty sure it's Linux not being the default option
| ogogmad wrote:
| Doesn'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.
| pseudony wrote:
| It is not a popularity issue. If it were, company after
| company would have switched as soon as they could make it
| work (office365, outlook online, whatever SAAS they use, none
| care about their desktop, only the browser, and all major
| browsers are available on Linux).
|
| From there, popularity outside the organization is
| irrelevant, internal support and userbase is for and on some
| version of Linux.
|
| As this would spread, we would eventually see global usage
| increase and global popularity become a non-issue.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| While 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| fithisux wrote:
| Interesting 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 wrote:
| Are the people behind this project the same as the Free95 team?
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