social.noyu.me

also yes i know it's called bluesky here on gnu/facebook but i don't app.net my chosts before scuttlebutting them

@hikari wait...

you mean userspace would be *entirely* win32? init would be running under wine?

@SoniEx2 not sure what init would be, maybe systemd, but yes as much of userspace as possible would be wine

@hikari @SoniEx2 imagining Linux fileutils included but you have to go into a binary named wsl.exe to use them

@mcc @SoniEx2 hahaha i was actually thinking right now that i might want to do something along these lines for an actually good reason: the os would try to not break your shit when upgrading, but would only make this promise for your windows stuff. if you want linux stuff it'd make sense to have it in a container, at which point it must start feeling a lot like wsl…

@hikari @SoniEx2 Well what I am thinking is that "WSL" can already mean multiple things (WSL1/WSL2) so if you expose the wsl interface (e.g., wslpath.exe, maybe use same mount points for win32 drive) then people who're already accustomed to making use of WSL will just find it is a drop in replacement vs what they're used to

Like maybe you could do BETTER than wsl but cross compatibility could lead to wins. Sometimes in my Windows tools I include "and here's how to use it from WSL" steps

@mcc @SoniEx2 yeah taking advantage of that familiarity would totally make sense! since the idea is you'd be using windows applications for as much as possible, it would already be reasonable to have a linux shell proxy available in wine land, and wsl.exe is the perfect name

@hikari @SoniEx2 "Wine Services for Linux"

@mcc @SoniEx2 oh my god

@saagar @SoniEx2 @hikari imagine if someone invented Android but good. That would be excellent

@mcc @saagar @SoniEx2 1990's windows ce my beloved. those were truly pocket computers

@mcc @saagar @SoniEx2 you know, with like applications, and a file system. you could actually do work on those. that's what they were made for!

@hikari I was seriously considering installing ReactOS a month or so ago but when I looked into it it appears ReactOS has just never got that Big Community Love and the compatibility of ReactOS is worse than modern Wine.

So at that point… yeah , if I understand your proposal right that would be a useful thing, and when MS pulls the plug on Win10 there will be demand for that

Maybe u could even reuse the ReactOS shell. Seems "obvious" the ReactOS GUI probably runs in Wine

@mcc

I was seriously considering installing ReactOS a month or so ago but when I looked into it it appears ReactOS has just never got that Big Community Love and the compatibility of ReactOS is worse than modern Wine.

yeah that doesn't surprise me, ReactOS has always been like that. i think the idea of “why not just use Linux underneath” is a long-floated idea in that community actually, i don't know if anyone actually did it though

when MS pulls the plug on Win10 there will be demand for that

you understand my motivations perfectly :)

Maybe u could even reuse the ReactOS shell. Seems "obvious" the ReactOS GUI probably runs in Wine

I WAS ALREADY PLANNING TO DO THIS WE SEE EYE-TO-EYE

@mcc it seems so obvious and so doable.

i do have a slightly grander additional goal though: i also want to figure out how to make this os have decent security. an os that is designed to let you download and run random exe's from the internet is great in many ways but not in security, at least not by default. but i have some ideas. i would want the user to be in full control of this though!

@hikari it seems like there are lots of sandboxing options that have never been seriously explored in industry because the people who control the sandboxes on consumer devices have a greater interest in limiting what the users do than in allowing the users to do a broader range of things safely

@mcc yeah. microsoft squandered so much potential when they tied all their new stuff to trying to become apple

@hikari Okay

Here is a serious offer

If you get your project working, I will beta test it

I have an empty partition ready for this and everything

@hikari You have to promise not to install viruses in my BIOS tho

@mcc does GRUB do that by default i don't know how it works in the year of our UEFI

@hikari i don't think so

I think UEFI is just a hard drive partition where various bootloaders live in harmony each in their own subdirectory. I think that's all it is.

@hikari I'm also interested in this for the same reason and like @mcc I also have an empty partition ready for this if you get it working

@hikari as someone who maintains a legacy software fork where the original got replaced by a new version release..

It depends what you see as a good use of time. Learning about doing such a project was a good use of time for myself (managing, channeling, motivating contributors)
But, better dont make it depending on the success or usage of the project, as this especially in such a size might become very painful.

@hikari I think it's kinda odd there hasn't been such a distro already tbh - it's something that sprung to my mind back when I was a teenager and first discovered Wine existed

Or if not a distro where *as much userspace as physically possible* is shifted to win32 (or win32 OSS recompiled under winelib) to the point the window management, sound slider, network manager, taskbar all run under wine...
...at least one where the typical linux desktop userspace for that sorta stuff is kept as some minimal openbox + panel + lightweight gtk2 applets thing

(I know there have been a few distros that ship wine + a few windows applications preinstalled as a feature, but didn't go quite that far)

Especially as even before the current win11 controversy, or win10 controversy (or win8 controversy) folks have been wanting a drop-in OSS replacement and ReactOS, for all the progress they have slowly made and how much doing the NT kernel reproduction sucks, is still fairly behind any modern linux distro + wine for compatability.

Personally, I'll probably shift my desktop back to Linux land when stuff stops working with win10 (which itself needed a LOT of 3rd party cleanup tools, extras to provide basic desktop functionality AND WSL 1 to feel "usable" to me) in the same way I've been using Linux on all my portable computers since ~2008 but I'd still be hella interested if such a project did ever reach a user-testable state