I'm saying this as Java developer. Delphi eventually proved itself to be the true "compile once, run everywhere". Can imagine others who wrote executables for Windows before the .NET times can relate to similar experiences.
Barely - most bigger programs did not adhere to all standards, but got custom fixes under the hood in follow-up windows versions.
Also, around 2001 was the big architectural change for desktop from DOS to NT, so this might seem like cherry-picking the timeframe selected.
It's true that the entire Windows product family converged onto the NT codebase with the release of Windows XP, but this isn't really relevant -- Windows executables and DOS executables were always different things, and despite being built on top of a DOS-based kernel, Windows 9x still supported the same Win32 binaries that ran under NT.
There was even an extension called Win32S that allowed Win32 executables to be run under Windows 3.1. The Win32 API dates to the early '90s, and modern implementations do support executables dating all the way back to the beginning.
I do that all the time. Just link to a static glibc or musl.
Maybe just don't use that library then? Or don't do that ridiculous thing where you fumble around at runtime desperately looking for executable pages that should just be included in your binary.
Some of these have a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire
They have never been all that successful.
I suspect there is not enough overlap between people who want to use Linux and people who need to run Windows apps that badly for it to be viable.
The biggest problem is games, and even with Steam's best efforts not all Windows games will run on Linux, AFAIK.
I run Mint as my main OS, but hardware compatibility is still a headache in Linux for me.
You might get lucky, but it sounds like you've not been lucky.
My current laptop, Thinkpad P16s AMD Gen 2, was pretty straightforward to get working with NixOS. No special drivers, and everything, including WiFi and function buttons on the keyboard, worked fine without any kind of special concessions.
This was also the case for my last non-Mac, from 2017-2020, I got Ubuntu installed on there without many headaches, and it wasn’t a specific Linux laptop, though again it was AMD.
Just transforming Windows syscalls into Linux syscalls is not enough. There should be some form of emulation involved.
Many apps, like games are using hardware, that means some additional layers of emulation.
>Imagine we made a new Linux distro. This distro would provide a desktop environment that looks close enough to Windows that a Windows user could use it without training. You could install and run Windows applications exactly as you do on Windows; no extra work needed.
I a rough user experience, some loss of performance and many bugs.
But I hope I am wrong, because the idea sounds really promising.
(ie.: only fairly old versions of MsOffice work on Wine)
Precisely correct. Linux should never have allowed system calls from outside libc or a big vdso.
They seem to not be interested in locking the hardware and they don't make much money from selling Windows and it shows. There aren't many strong improvements in Windows and it feels like Windows is a platform they use to sell other stuff they make money with - they are with Windows in a similar position Google is with Android.