loss32: let's build a Win32/Linux
83 points by Mateon1
83 points by Mateon1
[With tears of joy in my eyes] it's so beautiful! Scrollbars that show where I am, and that are big enough to click! A clearly distinct colour highlighting the active window! A consistent toolkit with good contrast and keyboard shortcuts!
We really have lost something in our modern desktops.
I have never loved something and hated something this much at the same time. It’s genius.
I loved the Stallman reference at the beginning.
One notable thing: WINE has surpassed Windows in backwards compatibility. It can easily run binaries that are 20-25 years old, whereas the latest Windows often cannot run binaries from the Vista age anymore. This will have implications for retro-gaming, of that I'm sure.
Ages ago (2003ish?) I remember playing with a port of WINE that ran on Windows. It was originally done for debugging: you could replace bits of Windows one at a time with their WINE versions and find the one that failed. I wonder if it would be easy to create a WoW layer that was WINE on Windows for retro gaming.
I believe the Win32 port of Wine was gutted not long after.
I wonder if it would be easy to create a WoW layer that was WINE on Windows for retro gaming.
I doubt. The easiest would be to put Wine in a VM, hook it up nicely with Hyper-V, and make an outside-system launcher to redirect exes there. Kind of a mirror of what Asahi does to run small page size games.
I distinctly remember reading that many games run in WINE perform better than natively on Windows. So why even use Windows at all if you are not playing the latest-and-greatest games?
I got Wine sort of working under WSL, 64-bit binaries only. It was near-trivial.
I'm sure with WSL2 you'll have the whole thing. Prize: win16 apps running in 64-bit.
My secret dream has been that Microsoft would do this for a new version of Windows.
same, and also that they’d open source it.
it’s not like they make any money from licenses, and most people would probably still use the tracking and advertising riddle default install that new laptops would still come with.
Very unironically awesome of an idea, and definitely a coherent mission statement!
Visually, I'll take WinXP Royale Noir / Zune over this Win95/98/2k style, but hey, if we get power user UIs back in Linux-land (that make use of modern hardware), I'll be a happy camper even if they're kinda ugly (probably).
On the other hand, having a true full set of power-user UIs would mean, among other similar things, writing a Win32 application to somehow wrap e.g. ifconfig?
Because we can.
I was expecting to see that on the page :-)
It doesn't seem like there's a repo, and thus no declared license for this (yet?)
Yeah, per the site this was just announced/created today, I expect more info to come later (maybe after congress?)
Anyway, as cursed as this is, Win32 as a stable Linux ABI is a recurring theme (previously), and this does seem like the most coherent execution of it I've seen.
Betting on WINE would have looked very odd maybe 5 years ago. But seeing what Valve is pulling off on Steam Deck, I consider this a pretty safe bet actually.
Impedance mismatches
Isn't it going to confuse users that half the applications show drive letters, and the other uses a Unix-like file system? Even if the users are developers.
Binaries can't be debugged easily
It seems like this is prioritizing binary compatibility with Windows. But lots of things are broken in WINE, and really hard to fix compared to on Linux, because you don't have access to the build environment for applications. If a Win32 application breaks, and you want to debug it, you'd want the build environment. The build environment for e.g. foobar2000 not available for loss32, so you'll have to remake it from scratch.
You could patch WINE to work better with a broken binary without looking at the source of the application, but I think many people use GNU/Linux or *BSD because they can swap things out and debug using the source. By buying into the binary-only way of thinking, you're giving that up.
You can have both source and ABI stability available
Just use TDE/Gtk1/Motif/Xlib and promise to keep the ABI stable forever. TDE, a fork of KDE3, provides lots of components necessarily for a desktop environment.
I know the site says that the screenshot is real, so question: what's the window manager being shown?
I'm not sure, but seeing as it has a taskbar with a start button, I'd say it's probably IceWM with a Win95 theme like this: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/2200974
Distributing Linux binaries is a pain and I'd stop just shy of saying that it's intentional and it's a good thing.
The FOSS world is very much a "build it from source" world, and personally I appreciate the force that exerts on people and organizations to make things at least visible source. I'd much rather rebuild something to target my latest system, with potentially better compilers and libraries, than running random opaque binaries inherited from my grandpa's PC from 1998.
But I do realize many other people hate this view and understand why they either just target Win32/Wine or stuff everything into a bloated flatpak/snap/docker container and call it day.
I've always thought that if I ever released a video game that got any sort of renown, and wanted to target Linux, I'd make the code visible-source (if not fully FOSS) while keeping the assets closed. Users would get the packaged versions from their distribution's repository and combine it with the purchased assets to get the full playable game.
Perhaps, one would sell the Windows version on itch.io/GoG, and the OSS Linux build can be pointed to its assets.
Great idea! There is Zorin OS, but it's a huge distro including many other features; I would appreciate if somebody makes a compact distribution with pre-installed Wine.
I'd applaud this effort. I think this is good, it can help WINE polish all its rough edges and potentially make WINE a viable target to develop against. It would be nice if we can eat Microsoft's lunch.
On the other hand, from personal experiences, I can say developing against the Win32 API can be pretty miserable. It's not all bad. There are some good designs here and there, I'll give it that. But overall, ew...