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?

@hikari Well, more like Win32 on top of GNU, which is... wait, like Windows 2000 running Win32 on top of a NT kernel.