Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference.
Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. They are symptoms of a desktop market that Microsoft locked hard enough that the rest of us had to reverse engineer our way out. Market damage, not collaboration.
The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach.
No CS curriculum holds up Win32 as exemplary API design. No system copied it. A successful API earns adoption. Win32 enforced it.
The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point.
And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute.
Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music.
That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.
In my experience even with games that have native Linux support running through proton seems to have less issues.
Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.
How is that successful cross platform?
Will I ever target it? No, I'd rather you rip my bones and eyes out. But it's unarguably successful.
Because hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations made it happen, not because Microsoft wanted it but in spite of it.
In this case the route to success was via marketing (isn't it always so?), via market share, via application dominance (attracting developers to develop for the platform), and via insane levels of backward's compatibility. It was successful not because of the code itself (end users don't care 2 figs about the elegance of the code) but because they optimized for the end user experience.
Linux optimized for the experienced, technically adept user, who wanted to fiddle, customize and could write programs. Apple optimized for the "now", ignoring the past and regularly made existing programs obsolete and unrunnable.
I wrote windows programs in 1995. They still run today. They have run on all versions of Windows since then, without even a recompile. Everything I have [1] just keeps running. And it turns out, that's something users really want.
I get that we're all technical folk here. I get that we strive for technical excellence and elegance. I get that we operate in the "now", ignoring hardware and software from the past. But the market is different, and wants different things. If you want a successful business you need to understand the market, not just your own aesthetics. Microsoft understands that, and that's why the market (especially the business market) relies on them.
[1] - Except games. Copy protection on some of my games means they don't run anymore - but to be fair those were hacks designed specifically to prevent the game running in the first place.
Arguably there has been equal or larger effort invested/wasted in cross-platform and cross-distro frameworks/APIs/packaging and yet the result still doesn't work. Partly that's due to duplication of effort; there's (mostly) one WINE competing with Qt/Gtk/whatever times Snap/Flatpak/AppImage/whatever.
I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.
YPPH•59m ago
dbacar•12m ago