I also have a used 1st-gen model, upgraded with hall-effect joysticks and a 2TB SSD with a glass screen protector that I am willing to part with. Apart from a few barely-visible scuffs on the plastic housing, it's in great condition. If you're interested, let me know how to get in touch!
Sending cash to a postal address isn't low-effort nor low-risk.
Payment by cheque is something I have never done, nor would I know how to do it. I'd have to ask at my bank -- not low effort. I don't know if I'm an outlier here but I have never heard from any of my peers who ever did such a thing.
The same or even worse is true for international money orders. The whole concept of making a money transfer to a postal address is something I have never heard of. Where's the IBAN?
The Wine team is right to put even PayPal before all of these.
Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.
We can't be pushovers about this.
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-paying-a-whole-lot-of-devel...
Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.
Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-thos...
So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them
And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.
Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.
It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!
By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.
So, notch up another score for Linux!
Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol
Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings.
I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along.
Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?
My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.
Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.
But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.
I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.
If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.
Anyway, I later stopped using it because Google Docs and then later libreoffice was good enough. I still followed it, and I continued to be impressed by all the announcements.
> This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.
Personally I stopped using Windows for gaming because it literally doesn't work anymore. I installed Windows 11 on my gaming VM and DLSS and FSR were just completely broken, didn't work at all. Couldn't figure it out. Switched to Linux (Bazzite for now) and I have no regrets; the only games that don't work are the dangerous time-wasters (live service games with invasive anti-cheat) that I have less and less time for as I age.
It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
Developers don't want to use Windows anymore. They all want to run Linux because servers do. Ballmer was right about one thing: It was about the developers.
Microsoft can't compete with Chrome at the K-12 level. A Chromebook is a fraction of the cost at twice the runtime, so nobody is going to learn Windows growing up. There won't be a generation of new ready-trained Microsoft consumers every year.
And the average consumer? Oh, they're running an iPhone and maybe an iPad that's it. If Apple were really smart they'd have released an iPhone screencast dock, but Apple still thinks the iPhone doesn't need multiple user profiles. However, even with Apple's stupid behavior, they're losing their core consumer audience.
Steam is tired of Microsoft, too, so they're pushing for compatibility. Video games are either cross platform, console exclusive, or easy enough to emulate. If nVidia's graphics drivers weren't so proprietary, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
The big holdouts are the same people that kept COBOL a live programming language in the 21st century: The business office folks.
Microsoft has missed the boat on smartphones, tablets, budget laptops, smart TVs, video game consoles (which is a little surprising), server-side infrastructure, development, and now AI. Their market prospects right now are Millenials and older that don't want change, people who need exactly Excel or Outlook, and PC video gamers that aren't interested in change. Their best product is VS Code and it's free, their second best product (SQL Server) is pricing people out, and their third best product (.Net) is also free.
At this point I think they're mainly hoping Adobe doesn't jump ship.
I mean, did they ever?
I've been programming just since ~2010, but I've only ever saw majority prefer macs due to hardware (with exception being late intel macs) and linux on the regular PCs.
With exception of game devs, I've not seen person who _happily_ defaults to windows, not due to fact that they have to because of company policy or because company is too cheap for an Apple device.
At the time Mac was still largely dominated by PowerPC and Classic OS. And Linux was still seen as an OS for hobbyists and universities. It was not taken seriously until well into the 00s and the 2.4 kernel. Sun was struggling with Java, and the unices were well into their decline from the 80s.
I would say that the transition was how much better Apache was than IIS when it came to operational and security issues.
And it's horrible.
I have no idea how electron apps look "internally" but it doesnt sound too bad.
Sort of like you can unzip .deb files and use them somewhere else, if what i heard was correct (never tried it myself)
I really like the comments on HN, they are very often really interesting and you actually often learn something new that actually matters.
> Could it be possible to make the relatively new AI meeting notes feature to work?
> Right now I get the following error when I click the "start transcribing" button:
Error occurred in handler for 'notion:get-media-access-status': TypeError: s.systemPreferences.getMediaAccessStatus is not a function
at /usr/lib/notion-app/app.asar/.webpack/main/index.js:2:631015
at WebContents.<anonymous> (node:electron/js2c/browser_init:2:87444)
at WebContents.emit (node:events:524:28)Being in the European energy sector we're naturally looking into how we can replace every US tech product with an EU/FOSS one. It's actually relatively easy to buy the 365 experience through consultants which will setup a NextCloud, Libre/Only Office, Proton and a teams replacement I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Beneath it there is a mix of Identity Management systems, often based around Keycloak, at least for now. It works, from what we've seen in Germany (specificlaly with their military) it's also possible to roll it out relatively quickly. It's all the "other" stuff that gets murky. There isn't a real alternative to AD/Entra, yet, from a governance perspective. There are great tech solutions which does the same thing, but they require a lot of IT man hours. Something the public sector is always going to be more willing to deal with than the private sector. If we collectively decided that trains in Denmark should be free for passengers, then that would happen. You can't do that in a private business, though security obviously does factor into it.
This is the general story really. Microsoft's copilot studio is relatively new, and it's probably been flying under the radar in a lot of tech circles because it's basically what power automate always wished it could be. Having used it to build a HR flow, where an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones, create a teams site with files and the relevant people for the relevant applications, and invite the applicant to their first appointment. Well... I gotta say that I'm not sure what we have that's an alternative to that. It took me a couple of hours to build it, and it frankly works better than I thought it would. Granted, I did know the tool because I had previously done a PoC where I build a teams agent which "took over" my teams interactions. Everyone noticed because it spelled correctly and wasn't capable of posting Warhammer 40k ORK meme's in any form of quality, but it was frightenly easy. What Microsoft sells in this area is again the governance of it all. You can do these things because of how EntraID lets you connect services seamlessly with a few clicks. While behind the scenes all of those clicks are only available to you because your IT department control them... Again... without hundreds of manhours.
I'm sure we'll eventually get there, but it'll likely come down to change management. Because even if you're willing to retrain your IT operations crew, it's not likely that they will want to leave the Microsoft world where they are well paid and job-secure. Well, maybe I'm in a cheese bell, but I've never met an Azure/Microsoft IT person who would want to work with something else, and having been forced to work a little bit with it behind the scenes, I sort of get it... well not really.
Which boils down to why Microsoft has always been good with enterprise customers. The decision makers in your organisation will listen to everything, but their own IT departments will often sort of automatically recommend Microsoft products and at the end of the day, it'll all boil down to risk. Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff? (this isn't an actual question I'm asking, it's what goes through the considerations.)
That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?
Whether that's true or not, it does mean that a lot of people who came up on Windows IT don't have a mental framework for how to run or manage Linux systems. Likewise, when I'm trying to diagnose something on Windows it just seems like the entire thing is a disaster; where are event logs? In the event viewer! How do I filter them? It's a mess! Can I search them? Kind of! Do they have information to help me diagnose the problem? Almost never!
On Linux, I know all the tools I need to solve all the problems that come up; on Windows, I have only minimal concept of how things work, and very little way to diagnose or debug them when they go wrong, which is often.
For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds, but I'm a Linux IT dork and I have no clue.
Windows and Linux dork here (heh). It has to do with how various computer manufacturers implemented the Sleep/Standby State (S3/S4), how they've resisted implementing a common standard at the hardware level, and how Microsoft eventually gave up arguing and patched around it with their own Modern Standby system in the S0 state.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.
When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.
I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.
The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.
You're probably breaking EU law by building this nightmare.
And even then, only if a job application rejection 'produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects that person in a way that they consider to have an adverse impact on their health, safety or fundamental rights'.
So as long as the company is recording the decisions taken and the reasons for those decisions, and providing those to candidates on request, they're in the clear.
I doubt that they are, but maybe!
There's an old saying in IT that was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
You'll notice that nobody says it anymore.
There are the more obvious ones like 3DFX/Glide, but there was also stuff like the Diamond Edge 3D, which used Sega Saturn style "quads".
I had to use PCem to get support for that stuff.
Everything works but the frame rate isn't great
If anyone knows a good Redguard setup for Linux please mail me, you can guess my mail easily. Now I just run the gog version
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.
I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.
Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.
Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.
Like obsolete Longene project?
They should be trivial to port then, no?
There does exist flatpak, everything that would benefit from a stable ABI could use that.
Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.
Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.
What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions.
If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.
I have a Windows game I can't run under CrossOver (aka Wine 11) or a VM, only because its anti-piracy layer doesn't accept those circumstances.
The problem with DRM is the DRM.
Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
I don't know how much of their business it is today, but CodeWeavers spent their first decade or so supporting only non-game applications. Their product Crossover was originally Crossover Office because it was optimized around productivity applications.
Even the announcement "trailer" of the steammachine showed it getting used on a Computer monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode. They even said they want to improve the "Desktop mode only" experience iirc and for there more apps than just games are important.
And i personally probably wouldnt have bought a steamdeck if it wasnt possible to just go into desktop mode and do whatever.
Is there any way I can use the Wine project to facilitate this compiling and running straight under x11/linux environment as a integrated project that doesn't require the end user to fiddle with Wine? I don't mind bundling shared code as needed. Help appreciated, I tried hard and failed at this endeavour priorly.
I believe that's what Winelib is for: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
The rest should be a matter of include and linker paths, but that's all I can recall right now.
The mind reels. They had the biggest moat in tech, and now small shops are easily tossing homemade ladders across the gap. AAA gaming is an industry larger than all of Hollywood, and Windows is no longer a critical component. This is incompetence on an unthinkable scale.
I wonder when and how Excel’s stranglehold will eventually be cracked, and if I will live to see it. Perhaps the new agentic universe will cause someone to finally make the Pixelmator of Excel.
[0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
⸻
1. A frequent debate about the time was whether this was a wise thing to do as it reduced the motivation for developers to create OS/2-native versions of applications. The slow death of OS/2 can be interpreted as both support for those who felt that Windows-under-OS/2 was a bad idea and those who felt that OS/2 was doomed from the start in the face of the Windows monopoly.
2. Largely because I’m not a gamer—when I’ve looked at what it takes, both in terms of hardware and in learning how to do stuff in games, I’ve decided that I’m happy staying that way.
Man, Wine just worked and I confess I copped out and just delivered MacOS and Windows targets.
It’s gotten good and reliable.
Commendations to contributors!
does microsoft still sell office?
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
I know the why, but it's really worse as an experience for most people than the older integrations... but the use of horizontally scalable backends makes for a saner platform at the expense of better UX.
The work is not boring (it's fascinating!) but completely thankless. The documentation on MSDN was (and I'm guessing still is) complete shit, and most of the APIs are undocumented. Random fixes would have knock on effects. I contributed a bit to some cases on a bug open since the 90s, and since I'm still on the list, I still get messages about it!
It's like the most trivial thing to change
> Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS
> Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS
> Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS
Amazing. I don't understand the low level details on how such a massive speed gain was ripe for the picking but I welcome!
I guess thanks Valve for pouring money into Proton.
That said, Wine+ntsync is still a win, just not a 8x improvement like the Dirt 3 benchmark suggests.
(And it case it's not clear, ntsync is https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html, which is a driver for Linux that offers syncronization primitives (mutex, semaphore, events) that more closely match the semantics of the Windows primitives. It's easier to do a direct implementation in Wine to support code compiled for Windows that expects to be talking to an NT kernel.)
The article actually goes into that in quite a bit of detail about that.
My particular challenge was similar in around how threads were created destroyed and signals between them (such as mutex). We ended up making our own wrappers to insure the different platforms acted the same. Even something simple as just moving between two supposedly 'same' linux distros could be different depending on what the ODM did to their packages and supported libs. Having a dedicated linux object that acts exactly like the windows one would have made that code much simpler to do.
Another place where there is a huge impedance mismatch is in the permission system. In many ways the VMS/NT way is wildly detailed. Linux can do that but you have to emulate it or use it directly and hope you get it right on both sides. There are several places where windows/linux have the same functionality but the APIs are different enough that multi platform support is kinda awful to do.
I've heard it's pretty good for fixing video playback/rendering (e.g. cutscene) issues if both the stable and the experimental branch of Proton can't make it work.
So aside from the stuff that has been implemented differently, running Proton instead of Proton GE is like trying to game on Windows N editions.
I absolutely love my Ally running SteamOS. Incredible work by... everyone involved, really.
> Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.
It means these games were already running well in Linux and even better now.
As I said, it's a nice idea but I have a feeling the complexity behind making this work well is what might have kept them from doing it.
Not for anyone using a kernel without these patches. Which would be most people.
It looks there was a copr for a custom kernel-fsync and projects like Bazzite or Nobara are adding patches.
From my understanding the fsync patches were never upstreamed.
The point being that these massive speed gains will probably not be seen by most people as you suggest, because most Linux gamers already have access to either esync or fsync.
The Proton build is Valve's build. It supports both fsync and esync, the latter of which does not require a kernel patch. If you're gaming on Linux with Steam, you're probably already using it.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Sure, gaming-focused distros, or distros like Arch or Gentoo might (optionally or otherwise), but mainstream? Probably not.
Of course, esync doesn't require kernel patches, so I imagine that was more broadly out there. But it sounds like fsync got you performance pretty close to what ntsync can do, but esync was quite a bit behind both? With vanilla being quite a bit behind esync?
(Also, jeez, fsync, what a terrible name. fsync is a syscall that has to do with filesystem data. So confusing.)
It's best not to assume with these things. With my stock Debian Stable kernel, Proton says this:
fsync: up and running.
And when I disable fsync, it says this:
esync: up and running.
> But it sounds like fsync got you performance pretty close to what ntsync can do, but esync was quite a bit behind both?
No, esync and fsync trade blows in performance. Here are some measurements taken by Kron4ek, who maintains somewhat widely used Wine/Proton builds:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200334/https://flightles...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200424/https://flightles...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200419/https://flightles...
> With vanilla being quite a bit behind esync?
Yes, vanilla Wine has historically fallen behind all of them, of course.
> Also, jeez, fsync, what a terrible name. fsync is a syscall that has to do with filesystem data. So confusing.
We can agree on this. :)
Fedora looks like it carries a whooping 2 patches on top of upstream
Is it worth to compare Wayland vs X11?
As a fellow CRUD writer you're kinda seconding the OP's point here...
Personally I say oh well, some people are smarter and/or harder working than me. Now watch this drive -
That was all nice and good for a while, but the times are ending.
I suspect there will still be a human involved in the production of software, but it will be domain experts, not CRUd monkeys who picked up just enough domain knowledge to be dangerous.
Sure but that’s a minority I’d argue. There wouldn’t be such a volume of shitty business software otherwise.
I will be interested to see if there are any economic effects of ending one of the last well paid, low barrier to entry careers in which some level of meritocracy was permitted.
AI tools can help good developers be more productive, but they won't magically make a mere domain expert able to produce good software.
Looking at your comments however, while probably not AI, they're still not helpful.
First time I've been accused of AI.
He will talk about OS events, or any low level concept and it makes me feel like I don’t know anything, but he acts like I’m a genius if I talk about JavaScript Runtimes, browser engines, anything frontend.
It’s cool he teaches me new things, I teach him some
Most people know that there is a big difference between experience in something pretty easy vs mastery of something very difficult.
A rocket scientist acknowledges a concrete guy knows way more than he does about concrete, but also knows that doesn't make him a genius because it's easy enough to learn just being around it. Plus, the rocket scientist also knows that since he knows so little about concrete, he wouldn't even be able to judge if the guy is really a concrete genius or just saying things a real pro would label wrong.
Your example isn't that crazy, but still, you should realize your friend is just being nice.
You don’t. Someone else smarter than you handled it already and you just need to integrate their solution.
On bit shifts, pick any Forth programmer and shaders will be almost like a toy for them. They are used to implement double numbers (and maybe floats) themselves by hand by just reusing the only integer numbers they have and writting custom commands to output these pairs of integer as double numbers. They can probably implement multithreading processing by hand in Forth and also know the IEEE standards for floats better than C programmers over 20 years.
Jog on.
GUI interfaces for the enterprise came from Dante's hell themselves. I hate them, they are like the Madhouse from that Asterix movie making satire of the European bureucracy of the day. The often are oddly designed and they are not documented at all, you must guess the meaning by chance of with a senior tutoring you.
The same with anything corporate from Microsoft with AD roles/group policies and the like. Or anything coming from IBM.
Understanding low level code puts you on entirely different level because you can reason about a problem using logic and how systems operate.
No disrespect to any crud devs here but from my personal experience they just know a particular implementation of their domain and rarely even consider how the code base even operates as a whole
It isn't "random", a as business process develop over time to various business/customer/regulatory needs. The business process evolves over time typically.
When you take a business process, you are often formalising it. The fact that you have no appreciation of this, tells me you don't really understand what you are talking about.
> Understanding low level code puts you on entirely different level because you can reason about a problem using logic and how systems operate.
You have to do this in high level languages as well. It isn't something that only low level devs do. In fact to be able to write any good code you need to understand the problem domain.
> No disrespect to any crud devs here but from my personal experience they just know a particular implementation of their domain and rarely even consider how the code base even operates as a whole
You are literally disrespecting them by saying this. It is also false, what you are describing is developers having deal with incomplete/poor specifications and poor documentation. BTW this is rampant through the industry. I wanted to do some stuff yesterday with Docker and Go, the documentation is non-existant.
CRUD developers know that they never, ever will, because business logic is insane.
If I were more money motivated I’d probably be building CRUD apps too. I just like weird puzzles XD.
Every so often I hit a problem that requires me to go all the way down to the OS level and find out what is going wrong or into the core framework and you find out that most of the code is actually less complex, better documented and clearer than a lot of the garbage bespoke applications you have to deal with at the higher levels.
Plenty of business apps don't really ask for much more than that, and those are the CRUD apps. They're not particularly challenging to write, nor is it very interesting to do so.
CRUDs do pay the bills.
So most of it.
Bleeding edge gaming and multiplayer anti-cheat is one area where I think having a big company owning the OS probably helps them stay ahead, as that structure probably lets them work with hardware designers to get the capabilities in use (i.e. in new versions of DirectX) and available to software developers first. There's generally a lag in adoption for new features within Vulkan and then usage downstream in wine/proton to get compatibility parity with windows, then the games themselves being able to run feature/performance parity. It'd be interesting to see what cooperation would be needed to have the linux gaming stack equal at the point new features are released, and with the least amount of manual hacks or command line tweaking required for the users. As discussed a few weeks back, tough anti-cheat for linux seems like a paradox with the current methods.
Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about private customers any more. They don't have money.
What has money though is enterprise/government sales, and MS got these customers tightly locked in. Compliance audits and tooling for insurances or legal stuff (SOX, GDPR, ...) are built against a full Microsoft stack of MS Server, Active Directory, Azure, Teams, Office 365 and Windows desktops.
You might be able to get away with replacing AD and GPO with Samba servers but even that is already a pain when the auditors come knocking. Everything else? There is no single FOSS based "standard offering" (i.e. a combination of everything needed to run an on-prem enterprise site, Office replacement, remote collaboration tooling), so every audit for such setups must be custom made and involves a lot of extra work.
A second leg is industrial control machines, medical devices and the likes. That's all stuff built by third party vendors and integrators. They need to continue on Windows because switching to an alternative OS would require redoing everything from scratch on the software and certification side. These customers buy the LTSC IoT stuff.
And that is why you see Microsoft pushing enshittification so hard on private customers... extract the last few cents you can from them. But the real money comes from the large customers.
WSL is already there for the folks that want to play with Linux.
Secondly, I do acknowlege your 40k reference.
The same with some multimedia CD's from its day. Scummvm it's partially implementing Macromedia Director support but the mentioned game had a custom engine. The Scummvm devs would RE in few weeks (it's a simple 2D game bundle, nothing difficult, with virtually no animations, almost everything it's still images) but no one began yet.
AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
Finally some embrace, extend, and extinguish love right back at Microsoft!
For x86, that's Windows. For mobile/VR, it's Android.
What glibc does not provide is forward compatibility. An application built with glibc 2.12 will not necessarily work with any older version.
Such application could be rebuilt to work with an older glibc as the API is stable. The ABI is not which is why the application would need to be rebuilt.
glibc does not provide ABI compatibility because from their perspective the software should be rebuilt for newer/older versions as needed. Maintaining a stable ABI mostly helps proprietary software where the source is not available for recompilation. Naturally the gnu guys building glibc don’t care about that use case much.
I guess you didn’t mention glibc in your comment but I already typed this out
Is this correct? I think you perhaps have it backward? If I compile something against the glibc on my system (Debian testing), it may fail to run on older Debian releases that have older glibc versions. But I don't see why an app built against glibc 2.12 wouldn't run on Debian testing. glibc actually does a good job of using symbol versioning, and IIRC they haven't removed any public functions, so I don't see why this wouldn't work.
More at issue would be the availability of other dependencies. If that old binary compiled against glibc 2.12 was also linked with, say, OpenSSL 0.9.7, I'd have to go out and build a copy of that myself, as Debian no longer provides it, and OpenSSL 3.x is not ABI-compatible.
> glibc does not provide ABI compatibility because from their perspective the software should be rebuilt for newer/older versions as needed.
If true (I don't think it is), that is a hard showstopper for most companies that want to develop for Linux. And I wouldn't blame them.
If the application is built against 2.12 it may link against symbols which are versioned 2.12 and may not work against 2.11 - the opposite (building against 2.11 and running on 2.12) will work
>If true (I don't think it is), that is a hard showstopper for most companies that want to develop for Linux.
Not really a show stopper, vendors just do what vendors do and bundle all their dependencies in. Similar to windows when you use anything outside of the win32 API.
The only problem with this approach is that glibc cannot have multiple versions running at once. We have “fixed” this with process namespaces and hence containers/flatpak where you can bundle everything including your own glibc.
Naturally the downside is that each app bundles their own libraries.
that's not correct. libraries have versions for a reason. the only thing preventing the installation of multiple glibc versions is the package manager or the package versioning.
this makes building against an older version of glibc non-trivial, because there isn't a ready made package that you can just install. the workarounds take effort:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2856438/how-can-i-link-t...
the problem for companies developing on linux is that it is not trivial
So in practice you can only have 1 linker, 1 glibc (unless you do chroot or containers and at that point just build your stuff in Ubuntu 12.04 or whatever environment)
In the context of games, that will likely be Steam Runtime.
the only way to achieve that is to get the older libraries installed on a newer system, or you could try backporting the new toolchain to the older system. but that's a lot harder.
From a bit of research it looks like FreeBSD for example only provides a stable ABI within minor versions and I imagine if you build something for FreeBSD 14 it won’t work on 13.
Stable ABI literally only benefits software where the user doesn’t have the source. Any operating system which assumes you have the source will not prioritize it.
(Edit: actually thinking harder MacOS/iOS is actually much worse on binary compatibility, as for example Intel binaries will stop working entirely due to M-cpu transition - Apple just hits developers with a stick to rebuild their apps)
> Stable ABI literally only benefits software where the user doesn’t have the source.
It also benefits people who don't want to have to do busywork every time the OS updates.
At Yahoo, we'd build on 4.3-4.8, and run on 4.x - 8.x. At WhatsApp, I think I remember mostly building on 8.x and 9.x, for 8.x - 11.x. The only thing that I remember causing major problems was extending the bitmask for CPU pinning; there were a couple updates where old software + old kernel CPU pinning would work, and old software + new kernel CPU pinning failed; eventually upstream made that better as long as you don't run old software on a system with more cores than fit in the bitmask. I'm sure there were a few other issues, but I don't remember them ...
Stable ABI benefits everyone. If I need to recompile a hundred packages with every OS update instead of doing real work then there's something seriously wrong with my OS.
By that point they already hit the developers enough to get them to port to aarch64
(arguably though this could be a special case because it is due to architectural transition)
I ask because my current laptop is getting long in the tooth, and if I were just buying it for productivity stuff, the current MBPs are beasts, but last time I checked years ago, gaming on os x was in a sad state, even compared to linux.
Apple may require rebuilds at some point for their Mac Store (or whatever they call it), but it's not required from a technical perspective.
The one exception here is CPU architecture changes, and even then, Apple has provided seamless emulation/translation layers that they keep around for quite a few years before dropping support.
for example here is a 20 year old binary of the game mirrormagic that runs just fine on my modern fedora machine:
~/Downloads/mirrormagic-2.0.2> ldd mirrormagic
linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f38000)
libX11.so.6 => /lib/libX11.so.6 (0xf7db5000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xf7cd0000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xf7ad5000)
libxcb.so.1 => /lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xf7aa9000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f3b000)
libXau.so.6 => /lib/libXau.so.6 (0xf7aa4000)
~/Downloads/mirrormagic-2.0.2> ls -la mirrormagic
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 em-bee em-bee 203633 Jun 7 2003 mirrormagic
Also the Windows ABI is still more stable than the Linux ABI. Even if Linux (non-SteamDeck) gaming share went up to like 50% or more, it still would probably be less of a hassle to build for Windows only, the performance difference on Linux+Wine isn't enough to matter.
DOOM runs on any Linux system since forever because we had access to the source. You can build it for Linux 2.6 and it’ll probably still work today.
Sadly most games are proprietary
In the end I gave up and just used proton on the windows .exe. Unbelievable. :(
In some cases such libraries are also cross-platform so the same issues would be found on Windows (eg: try to build application which depends on openssl3 with openssl4 and it will not work on either Linux or windows)
For future reference if you ever need to do that again, it would be way easier to spin up a container with the build environment the software expects. Track down the last release date of the software and do podman run —-rm -it ubuntu:$from_that_time and just build the software as usual.
You can typically link the dependencies statically during build time to create system independent binaries. So the binary produced inside the container would work on your host as well.
/s
Open source software also needs a stable ABI because:
a) i don't want to bother building it over and over (not everything is in my distro's repository, a ton of software has a stupid building process and not every new version is always better than the old versions)
b) a stable ABI implies a stable API and even if you have the source, it is a massive PITA to have to fix whatever stuff the program's dependencies broke to get it running, especially if you're not the developer who made it in the first place
c) as an extension to "b", a stable API also means more widely spread information/knowledge about it (people wont have to waste time learning how to do the same tasks in a slightly different way using a different API), thus much easier for people to contribute to software that use that API
Which means that a .exe without the exact version of wine won't run.
Plus of course there's the whole vulkan stuff. Older cards aren't well supported but it will rather crash than just run openGL normally where it would work fine.
It's effective enough for it to be practically a solved problem now.
>What works fine today will completely fail next year.
Usually not on the timescale of a year. I have many new games that worked a year ago and none of these stopped working now. The worst breakage I had recently was some physics glitches in an old RPG (released in 2001) on Wine 11.0, and it was fixed in the next release.
Either way my comment is intended as more humorous than truly insightful or prophetic.
OS/2 may have been a better Windows than Windows during the Warp days 30-ish years ago. It was also a very competent operating system in its own right.
We all know the story:
It never had a broad base of native applications. It could have happened, but it did not happen. Like, back then when Usenet was the primary way of conducting written online discourse, the best newsreader I had on OS/2 was a Windows program; the ones that ran natively on OS/2 weren't even close.
And OS/2 never had support from a popular company. There were times at OS/2's peak (such as it was) when it was essentially impossible to buy a new computer with OS/2 pre-installed and working correctly even from IBM.
Linux, though? Over those same 30-ish years, a huge amount of native applications have been written. Tons of day-to-day stuff can be done very well in Linux without even a hint of Wine and that's been reality for quite a long time now.
The missing piece, if there is one, is gaming. It'd be great to have more native games and fewer abstraction layers. But systems like Valve's popular Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine are positive aspects that OS/2 never had an equivalent to. And since Steam is very nearly ubiquitous, companies that sell computer game software do pay attention to what Valve is doing in this space.
(And frankly, when a game runs great in some Steam/Wine/Proton/Vulkan shapeshifting slime mold abstraction stack, I really do not care that it isn't running natively. I push the button and receive candy.)
FYI the link to the Rosetta branch at the end 404s. Maybe change the point to the main repo?
Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.
If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM.
Like it or not, the business world runs on Office.
I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.
Maybe if EU requires local governments to use LibreOffice (or other OSS alternatives like MijnBureau) companies will follow.
[0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/11/thunderbird-adds-native...
[1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
[2] https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive + https://github.com/bpozdena/OneDriveGUI
[3] Store the SP cookie via konqueror visiting the SP site, then open it in dolphin via "webdavs://CORP.sharepoint.com/sites/SITE/Shared Documents/" (sometimes the cookie is very short-lived)
The main problem is Word - for the documents I regularly work with professionally (large, complex, collaboratively-edited) the web-app is just not feature complete and sometimes struggles to cope.
Also, FWIW, the web Powerpoint is an awful experience.
After a brief flirtation with a virtual machine for Windows and Office (nah) I had to take a step back from Linux and use a Mac again.
ReactOS is always almost there.. except it doesn't quite get there; same goes for Wine, as they have a lot in common?
I expect the biggest reasons businesses use Windows these days are momentum, and lower support costs (Linux is still less reliably than Windows on real laptop hardware).
I've tried very much to make this work on Linux with the web apps, but they're just not good enough - not feature complete, and quite slow and clunky compared to the native equivalent.
Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.
https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...
I mean, I know Mac has had some great games (eg. I spent so much time on school Macs playing that Bolo tank game) ... but they have probably <1% of the number of games Windows has. I'd expect a simiilar percentage of devs to be interested in Mace (or whatever you call Mac Wine).
It seems that neither esync or fsync do this though - why?
Claude thinks that "nobody was motivated enough to write and debug the complex shared-memory waiter-list logic when simpler (if less correct) approaches worked for 95% of games, and when correctness finally mattered enough, the kernel was the more natural place to put it". Is that true?
It is not. Perhaps this should be possible, but Linux doesn't provide userspace facilities that would be necessary to do this entirely in userspace.
This is not merely an API shim that allows Windows binary object to dynamically link and run. It’s an effort to recreate the behavior of NT kernel synchronization and waiting semantics. To do this, Linux kernel synchronization primitives and scheduler API must be used. You can read the code[1] and observe that this is a compatibility adapter that relies heavily on Linux kernel primitives and their coordination with the kernel scheduler. No approach using purely user space synchronization primitives can do this both efficiently and accurately.
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/n...
That same code should be portable to userspace by: - Allocating everything into shared memory, where the shared memory fd replaces the ntsync device fd
- Using an index into a global table of object pointers instead of object fds
- Using futex-based mutexes instead of kernel spinlocks
- Using a futex-based parking/unparking system like parking_lot does
Obviously this breaks if the shared memory is corrupted or if you SIGKILL any process while it's touching it, but for Wine getting that seems acceptable. A kernel driver is clearly better though for this reason.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/7/30/1399 [2] https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
In my experience, as of now the one that works best and seamlessly is the 20 year old office 2007.
There’s never been a POSIX equivalent to this. It requires sophisticated kernel support and the exact same parity can’t be achieved in user space alone.
There was also something about needing to back out if any of the reads fails to acquire, which also sounds nasty.
Ah, interesting, so wfm does both the wait and the acquire!
When using eventfd it is indeed annoying having to both poll and later read to disarm the object (there are epoll tricks that can be used but are not generalizable).
The signal+wait is also a primitive that it is hard to implement atomically on posix.
They'll take your money, and you'll be contributing to wine.
It looks like they do commercial wine projects. Might cost more than a coffee a day tho!
Codeweavers is literally the company behind Wine. Without them project would never reach point where it is now.
Codeweavers developers historically been authors of 2/3 (and likely even more in past) commits in Wine.
CodeWeavers : Wine :: IBM/RedHat : Fedora
I'm playing on wine now for several years now, my deepest respect for the developers involved. Thank you!
[0]: https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/
the gains would trickle up, no?
Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......
But you also have a pretty powerful card, unless you're gaming in 4K you could probably take a performance hit and not even notice.
I have a 3060 (prev: 1660 ti) and I can say that I've definitely noticed a difference in performance in lots of games.
And then it never was more than half…
Ads keeps loading and unloading, causing the page to jump around, and lose track of what I was reading.
The article is really interesting, but I am actively getting frustrated with my phone.
Can we finally ditch windows ?
What's the point of being a "journalist", when your job is to write words and instead a machine has written them? What is the point of such a "journalist"?
P.S. I am assuming "Lead Technical Editor" falls under the umbrella of "journalist" in some sense
I've been writing for nearly a decade, and I can assure you, all of this is human written. I've long been writing about the Linux kernel where it's been relevant to my coverage, and there are articles under my name talking about low-level technical aspects in drivers and kernels from as far back as 2017.
I get that it's hard to know what to trust out there given that Dead Internet Theory is beginning to feel like a reality, but comments like this can be quite upsetting after spending days researching and writing an article like this. I totally get criticism of the article itself, and I'm fine with that, but it feels as if people are too quick to jump on the "must be written by AI" bandwagon. I receive it, my colleagues receive it, and for the people who I know put in so much effort into their work, it can be upsetting to them as well.
As was mentioned in another thread, there were actually a couple of typos in this article when it went live. I cleaned those up once they were pointed out, but AI doesn't make typos. I get it to an extent; hostility and accusations of all kinds have been levied at writers for the years and years I've been in this industry writing long-form content and analysis. But with the proliferation of AI, that hostility has really ramped up over the last couple of years.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of the work for Wine is boring and thankless. Digging through and trying to get exact parity with both the documented and undocumented behavior of Windows for the past 30 years doesn't sound fun, but it's finding every little weird edge case that makes Wine a viable product.
The fact that Wine runs a lot of games better than Windows now (especially older games) shows a very strong attention to detail and a high tolerance for pain. I commend them for it.