social.noyu.me

Ah, there is a huge technical dream of ours (that a few of you may know of) — of the operating system variety — that we might have figured out how we can make happen without it killing us (we can't carry three worlds on our back, two is already too much).

Something we've been wanting to do for roughly… a year now? Maybe a bit longer than that? Something we have confided in a few people over (some in DMs, some IRL), but generally been quite quiet about. Something we have sought funding for and been rejected.

Because the thing is already half-possible today, you “just” need to mash together off-the-shelf open-source software, we think… it might be possible… to bait the right kind of Linux/FOSS people into fulfilling the dream if we can articulate it well enough and help co-ordinate.

In fact that's probably the only way to get this to work, because as impressive as touchHLE was, it was a feasible one-person project; patching WINE, ReactOS, the Wayland server used by GNOME, packaging it all for Debian, and so on and so forth, that's a huge project…

…too large a project for a single person, regardless of how weird she might be, but individually, it's just a few weekend projects for a dozen or so FOSS maintainers and suddenly you have something half-usable…

We will not get a delusion of grandeur over this, we would literally just be an “ideas guy” if you will, but there's a … there's a way to make this work.

In at least two months' time.

When we're better-rested and in control over our life again…

Here is a hint about what we're talking about:

Did you know that already, today, without patching anything, with a few lines of Bash you can, on any modern Linux distro, get it to boot into an entirely-WINE environment that bears a striking resemblance to Windows 2000?

…and we'll try to get back to you and co-ordinate efforts a tiny bit in maybe a month or two when we're not, y'know, struggling to just exist.

Oh, and as a teaser, and as proof we're not delusional about this, please check out the many screenshots in this thread where we were quietly proof-of-concepting this:

https://x.com/hikari_no_yume/status/1794500608923455848

(We would really prefer to link the fediverse version of this thread obviously, but our instance's search is broken and it's from May last year, and we haven't been able to find it on Google or DuckDuckGo, so it'd take a long time to dig up alas!)

Someone kindly dug up the Fedi thread!! Check it here: https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01HYRYZXMSDQHA2NPAFHS31Y9C

It seems like a trusted collaborator is planning to make their own post about this containing roughly the same info, but which will probably be far better written, so our Fediverse followers may want to hold off on retweeting/boosting for a bit, you'll know her when you see her!

Given the state of our mental health, I can promise you all one thing: we are not planning to be a “project lead” on this exactly; what we think is that we might be able to articulate a vision well enough, and do a tiny bit of co-ordination work, that we don't have to.