Convert Linux to Windows

Posted by pbohun 3/29/2025

Convert Linux to Windows(philipbohun.com)

371 points | 452 commentspage 3

hugo1789 3/30/2025|

Why so complicated? Wine is cool if you need to run an existing binary but when you're writing your own software, why not just compile the platform independent part into a binary and make the platform dependent part a little library (open-source)?

bentt 3/30/2025||

This is a wonderful idea and could succeed if the creator could rally the right devs and users. What it really needs is Ubuntu tier branding and UX work. This has been a rarity in the Linux desktop space.

I am hopeful SteamOS will bring us something very similar.

DeathArrow 3/30/2025|

>What it really needs is Ubuntu tier branding and UX work.

That means somebody paying for the work. Designers and UX specialists don't care about free work like many programmers do.

bentt 3/30/2025||

Yeah Blender might be a good model here.

foxes 3/30/2025||

20 year old games don’t work on modern windows that well at all, so that’s one counter example, so not sure where the point comes from.

int_19h 3/30/2025||

It really depends on the game, but generally speaking, 20 year old games (that would be from 2005) work on modern Windows just fine. Games developed back in Win9x era are usually more troublesome.

tombert 3/30/2025||

I recently played Sinistar Unleashed on my Linux laptop.

I was never able to get this game working on regular Windows hardware, even when I bought the game brand new and tried running it on a contemporary computer, but it runs fine with Wine and Proton.

I decidedly could not get it working on a dual boot of Windows 10 (that I installed just to play to it).

Granted, even with Wine it wasn’t trivial to get working, but it wasn’t that bad. The game is actually not bad, I would have loved playing it as a kid, but I had to wait 25 years for Wine to let me play it, apparently.

throwaway48476 3/30/2025||

Do you use CD drive emulation with wine?

tombert 3/30/2025||

I actually didn't for this, I was able to mount the ISO with linux and then run the executable directly to install it, then futz around with Wine settings on the install path to eventually get the game launching.

jchw 3/30/2025||

First-class support for Windows applications might just become doable, if Wine continues to progress and Win32 doesn't accelerate. There were a handful of quality of life improvements in previous Windows releases, but the biggest Win32 changes feel like they happened quite a while ago by now, and for good reason: Win32 is stable and mature. It's still a moving target, but not by nearly as much, and even if Microsoft wanted to move it for the sake of moving it, they might find more resistance than they can completely overcome. For now, I think Wine is still not good enough to recommend people just use for everything, though. It's incredible, but incredible doesn't make Photoshop install.

However, I also think that we could "solve" a lot of the compatibility problems.

There are tons of old Linux binaries that don't work anymore. But... They could. A lot of old binaries, surely the vast majority, could absolutely run on a modern kernel. The problem is the userspace. The binaries themselves contain oodles of information that could be used to figure out what they need to run, it's just that there's nothing in place to try to make sure that stuff is available.

I really believe we could make it possible for a distro, out of the box, to make old binaries "just work", double-click and run. Want to install an old game from an .rpm or .deb you have? The system could identify what base OS that is and install it into it's own chroot with its dependencies, then create desktop icons for it. Execution failures? Missing libraries? Xlib errors? Let's have a graphical error message with actionable help.

Well, it could be done, anyway. If you wanted to follow the spirit of Windows here, it would be the right thing to do, and it'd help users who found a thing that says it supports "Linux" run that thing the way they would hope and expect it to run. Will it actually happen? Not unless someone makes it happen, and convinces distros, desktops and all other stakeholders it's worth shipping, then maintains and improves it going forward. It's a bit depressing when you realize that the technical part of implementing this is basically the least challenging part, at least for a proof of concept.

t43562 3/30/2025||

Dancing to a proprietary tune is risky - they can decide to change the API or go after you with lawsuits if it becomes too competitive.

You can provide backwards compatibility in Linux - you can keep old versions of libraries installed. The more commercial distros do this to a greater degree. It's roughly what windows is doing to achieve the same result.

It's just a cost to arrange and since most distros aren't making billions in licensing they choose not to pay it.

Obviously I have nothing against a wine-focused distro but I wouldn't myself waste a fraction of a second writing code against the windows API by choice.

Levitating 3/30/2025||

The suckless project gave us stali linux, a statically compiled linux distribution.

Doesn't static compilation solve quite a few of the problems states here?

https://sta.li/

samtheprogram 3/30/2025|

Yes. It’s the same reason AppImage could work — if the licensing allows for the all libraries to be included in the image, because the Linux syscall interface is generally stable.

“We do not break userspace”

Levitating 3/30/2025||

AppImages have a few problems. Ever seen how much dependencies you need installed to execute an AppImage?

You also need to be in an environment where you can create FUSE filesystems. And iirc the reference implementation requires the deprecates fuse2 library to work.

Snaps, Flatpaks, AppImages and static linking are all solutions to a real problem. But I don't think AppImages are an especially good solution.

I talked a bit with Richard Brown about supporting AppImages in Aeon, the OpenSUSE immutable distro. But he believed the base system would need far too much dependencies specifically to support the AppImage runtime including deprecated fuse2 support.

account42 3/31/2025||

Snaps and Flatpaks have many more dependencies than AppImage, they are just not deprecated YET.

Levitating 4/1/2025||

True, but I believe Flatpaks offer more than just "single executable applications". In the case of Aeon it's the primary way of installing additional software.

cyp0633 3/30/2025||

I still can't get MS Office 365 working on Linux over Wine, while no alternatives make me comfortable. Comparing Linux and Win32 ABI on Linux is nonsense without talking about Wine compatibility.

d3Xt3r 3/30/2025|

Have you checked out OnlyOffice recently? If so, I'm curious what are the deal-breaking features you find that it lacks compared to M365.

tuananh 3/30/2025||

why am i getting the vibe that onlyoffice is closed-source.

it's actually open https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

1970-01-01 3/30/2025||

>Imagine we made a new Linux distro

Imagine we made a new shade of brown

Seriously, this is the most cliché thing you could do with Linux.

delusional 3/29/2025||

> We also already have a simple way to run Windows applications, Wine.

Are you high? There is nothing simple about Wine. It's at once a kludgy mess and a technical masterpiece, what it isn't is simple.

trelane 3/30/2025||

Depends. Proton and CrossOver are dead easy, especially for the supported apps.

3np 3/30/2025||

Easy to use? Sure. Simple? No way.

trelane 3/30/2025||

https://support.codeweavers.com/en_US/2-getting-started/2-in...

Seems easy to me

3np 3/30/2025||

Again, sure. Now try to contribute to the source.

https://www.christopherspenn.com/2021/08/simple-is-not-easy/

trelane 3/30/2025||

What source?

3np 4/1/2025||

Proton/Wine/CrossOver.

hagbard_c 3/29/2025||

Fairly simple for the end user, not simple in its implementation.

keyringlight 3/30/2025||

Like a lot of things in any OS it depends how far off the beaten track you go. I think there's a lot of gaming newcomers to linux where their main exposure for wine is via steam, which generally wraps things up for them and hides the details behind their launcher. If you need to go diving into the details for compatibility or you'd like to separate things out with prefixes then it's definitely much less polished and elegant, but I'd argue you could say the same thing about windows for compatibility with some old games or sites like PCGamingWiki.com would be a lot smaller as the combinations of windows (or DOS)+drivers+hardware over the years hasn't resulted in perfect consistent compatibility.

marcodiego 3/30/2025|

> Try doing the same with a Linux binary that's just a year old.

AppImages are very close to fixing this. I'm not sure if it is already solved or very close to.

zitsarethecure 3/30/2025|

Adobe Reader for Linux hasn't been updated since 2013 but the flatpak still works fine.

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