Win32 is the stable Linux ABI

113•krautburglar•2h ago

Comments

aggling•1h ago

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•1h ago

you have full control of a Linux system. win32/linux respects your rights that microsoft doesn't. that's the difference.

aggling•1h ago

That is irrelevant to the feasibility of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.

tapoxi•58m ago

It's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30 years and has excellent compatibility at this point.

aggling•38m ago

5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not excellent compatibility.

raddan•55m ago

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•43m ago

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.

nialv7•1h ago

Unironically, yes. It's time that Microsoft taste their own medicine of embrace, extend, and extinguish.

ezoe•1h ago

But would you want to run these Win32 software on Linux for daily use? I don't.

pjmlp•1h ago

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•48m ago

> Gamers have no other option, and thanks Valve, game studios have no reasons left to bother with native Linux clients

But they do test their Windows games on Linux now and fix issues as needed. I read that CDProjekt does that, at least.

mikkupikku•43m ago

CDProjekt releases native linux builds.

not_a9•31m ago

I don’t think Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 have Linux builds available for the common folk? Cyberpunk has a ARM64 Mac build, though.

kaoD•43m ago

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•34m ago

...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•14m ago

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?"

keyringlight•43m ago

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.

jcelerier•26m ago

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.

rickcarlino•1h ago

Building GUI utilities based on VB6 instead of status quo web technologies might actually be more stable and productive.

andy_ppp•1h ago

Honestly, it’s probably faster and less resource intensive through emulation than your average Electron app :-/

jeremyjh•24m ago

Wine Is Not an Emulator (WINE). It provides win32 APIs; your CPU will handle the instructions natively. There is no “probably” about it.

pjmlp•1h ago

I would vote for Delphi/FreePascal, but share the sentiment.

NooneAtAll3•56m ago

Lua

pjmlp•52m ago

Performance?

Etheryte•44m ago

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.

CWuestefeld•36m ago

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.

bobajeff•15m ago

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.

andsoitis•15m ago

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.

frumplestlatz•1h ago

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.

znpy•1h ago

> What is this? A dream of a Linux distribution where the entire desktop environment is Win32 software running under WINE.

I might unironically use this. The Windows 2000 era desktop was light and practical.

I wonder how well it performs with modern high-resolution, high-dpi displays.

hxorr•59m ago

I've also had the same thought...

QuadmasterXLII•45m ago

I’m in if this is happening

andrewf•1h ago

Starting with FreeBSD might be easier than starting with Debian then removing all the GNUisms. But perhaps not as much Type II fun.

tssva•16m ago

Using Linux gets you much more hardware compatibility especially for the consumer desktop and laptop systems this is targeted towards.

foxrider•1h ago

I mean... isn't that just X11 light compositor (like IceWM) with binfmt enabled?

oybng•1h ago

It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away

hypeatei•1h ago

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•50m ago

Do you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?

hypeatei•30m ago

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.

Ygg2•55m ago

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•10m ago

He was talking about user interface not app compatibility

pjmlp•59m ago

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.

Ygg2•52m ago

Damn, they didn't miss a spot to add a Loss comic reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel)

Lutzb•19m ago

Thank you. I was contemplating the logo but my brain could not make the connection.

tosti•45m ago

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•40m ago

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.

juliangmp•34m ago

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.

mikkupikku•44m ago

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•35m ago

Wine works on windows too. It's used by the shorthorn project to get software for newer versions of windows to run under XP.

andsoitis•21m ago

> There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows

What are some examples?

Verdex•10m ago

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.

the__alchemist•44m ago

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•39m ago

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•28m ago

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•23m ago

There really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system, proportionately.

jimbobthrowawy•32m ago

I think there's a quote from Linus himself saying this.

senfiaj•29m ago

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•8m ago

It's really just glibc

bobajeff•24m ago

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•19m ago

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.

haunter•7m ago

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

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