Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
by nine_k on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @06:29PM
(#41373925)
Windows NT (2000, XP, etc) used to include an emulator allowing to run DOS apps and win16 apps. I don't see why running older / obsoleted win32 APIs through an emulation layer won't be a good approach. Maybe even by adopting and running Wine.
Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
by yellowapple on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @08:43PM
(#41374904)
> there wasn't a standard executable format for linux beforehand (static? tarball of program and dynamic libraries? .deb file? AppImage? Flatpak? Higher-level language like java?).
By this logic there wasn't a standard executable format for Windows, either (static? zip archive of program and dynamic libraries? .msi file? installer program? UWP? higher-level language like C#?).
Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
by lloeki on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @04:01AM
(#41377141)
> I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system.
Sometimes running old software atop Wine on Windows is the easiest - or even only - option to have said old software work on new Windows.
I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system. So in the long run wine/proton/mono will implement windows features on linux in an optional/replaceable/modular way in user-space while keeping backwards compatibility for older windows software, while windows is forced to implement (and distribute these features) with their OS and has to sacrifice backwards compatibility if they want to simply their OS.
I would say that the adoption of wine/proton helps the linux ecosystem a lot more because there wasn't a standard executable format for linux beforehand (static? tarball of program and dynamic libraries? .deb file? AppImage? Flatpak? Higher-level language like java?). How do you reliably link to libraries like mesa or even glibc? Now there is a solution: just distribute a windows program and test it to confirm it works in wine/proton. Perhaps it is better for DirectX adoption, but it seems like Vulkan/OpenGL/WebGPU are still superior in terms of cross-compatibility, regardless if you use wine or not.