social.noyu.me

I feel like announcing the thing before we had a shippable prototype was a grave sin. it's normally something we avoid under any circumstances. it's bad for motivation and for credibility. touchHLE's announcement had a video and an exe file and source and a fully-working game!

touchHLE was a dream of ours for about a year and a half before we actually did it. as it happens, the incubation time for the loss32 idea has been about the same, we started playing with it in early 2024 I believe. one reason to go public was to force us to actually get it done

trivia: we applied for an NLnet grant for this project in December 2024 and got a rejection in April 2025

okay, we must apologise for our unreasonable optimism, the loss32 mvp/poc release is not going to ship today, consider it delayed for a few more days or something

we did finally get some stuff written but we started on it late, and we still have a broken relationship with swdev

@hikari loss32 is an amazing name :D

Take your time, people can wait

@hikari any hints on the specs of loss32? Desktop, package manager etc?

Massive bonus points if you ship it on a linux-libre ISO and get it listed as an FSF Approved system just like FreeDOS.
(my only experience with blobless Linux is running Trisquel with KDE for a week: totally unremarkable compared to other Debian/Ubuntu offspring (antix/MX, Q4os, Kanotix) aside from getting 10% longer battery life than usual)

RE: https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01KG15QRS46X4HXY3K8WNZ2VHR

@moses_izumi it would be very very funny if it was FSF approved, maybe we should pursue this goal just for that reason

@hikari The only reason it wouldn't be embraced by the Stallmanites is that Win32 is still a living platform (despite MS's attempts to replace it with UWP or whatever) and that Wine gets better compatibility when using the official libraries.

An even funnier scenario would be if it went full circle and got ported to MS-DOS: as anything recent enough to run a current Wine could probably run it from Haiku, NetBSD or Corpo Unix just fine (I dunno).

I'm more interested in using it as a contained environment than as a replacement for Plasma and XFCE.

@hikari Frankly it'd just be nice to have a distro on the FSF list that isn't just a tedious offshoot of one that already exists.

I also suggest including a disassembler as one of the preloaded apps, to mitigate the effects of implicitly supporting Microsoft's monopoly and monoculture.

"In another world with my win32"