“I can't tell you how many times the ability to just download a goddamn .exe file and run it in WINE has saved my ass. Seemingly every creative project I undertake eventually requires downloading some piece of software which is either impossible or impractical to rebuild myself, and whose Linux and macOS ports no longer work or never existed. There's more than three decades of Win32 software — .exe files! — that can run in WINE or (of course) on Windows. No other ABI has that kind of compatibility record. WINE can even run Win16 stuff too.”
“A desktop environment where everything runs in WINE will stimulate making WINE better for everyone, whether they're going to use this project or not.”
“As a bonus, the OS would still technically be a Linux distro, so it would be possible to run Linux software when necessary, something ReactOS can't do. ”
- Hikari no Yume, on the project’s official website
Loss32 is an effort to leverage Wine as a full-blown desktop environment for a Linux system, as opposed to the usual approach of treating it as a compatibility layer.
The existing Wine frontends (i.e Q4Wine or Lutris) don't accomplish much beyond alienating the user from the process of running Windows software on non-Microsoft platforms.
The convenience features or easily accessible configuration options that they do offer would be more useful if they were implemented as part of a desktop environment, and using a spruced-up version of WineDesktop as the primary window manager (even for Linux software) is a fairly reasonable approach: especially if you backport some of the perks of the Unix window managers.
- holding the super (windows logo) key to move and resize windows without touching the titlebar or edges
- option to make the windows transparent during move and resize
- option to make inactive windows transparent
The first one seems to have been standard practice exist since 1987’s TWM, the latter are available in XFCE (one of the more popular graphical environments on Linux and other recent Unix-like systems) and probably a few others.
as much as I like X11 and Wayland's various graphical environments, I still think running Linux software through Wine's window manager as the primary could be a compelling option.
- freely redefinable colors, just like Windows 95
- supports your gaudy Windows XP themes (the Royale themes and some of the fanmade ones are pretty nice, but the less said about the orignals the better)
- would be funny if it wound up using less resources than KDE Plasma and GNOME (the former relies on theme packages to define colors, the latter only supports the usual light mode/dark mode dichotomy last I tried)
As much as I understand the desire to run Win32 software on Linux as a way of avoiding Linux's slightly bothersome packaging ecosystem, basing your entire OS around a proprietary ever-changing ABI is pretty undesirable in the long haul.
To this end I suggested including a debugger or disassembler as a way of encouraging people to reverse-engineer proprietary software and port them to other platforms, and Hikari had already done the former.
She also enjoyed my suggestion of packaging it with an Free Software Foundation-certified distro (i.e the ones that don't ship drivers for most graphics cards or wifi recievers because those are usually proprietary)
She found it very humorous and it aligns well with her legal (and technical) concerns around ship the WineTricks install scripts**: but frankly I just thought it'd be neat if the FSF's list contained something novel***.
(for what it's worth, the FSF already put FreeDOS in their Free Software Directory)
** WineTricks is one big pile of rickety install scripts for installing .net runtimes and other things you might need, accompanied by a crappy menu that doesn't even keep track of what you've already installed.
***other than Guix, which obstensibly started as a FSF-approved version of NixOS (like Trisquel and Parabola are to Ubuntu and Arch), but gradually became it's own thing with it's own package manager/build system
(don't quote me on this, since all of *my* Linux computers run some form of Debian or Android)
All things considered, I'm surprised that this one hasn't already been attempted 10-20 years ago by literally anyone else.
- some radical LibreOffice developer who thinks that creating a FOSS stand-in for Windoze is just as important as a FOSS stand-in for Office
- some Qubes developer trying to build the most secure and auditable way of running Windows software
(who am I kidding, they're probably content with just running Windows in a virtual machine :P).
- Smartphone-centric Linux distros like postmarketOS, Mobian or Maemo Leste using it to poke fun at the Windows on ARM situation
(my dad is still disappointed that Windows RT blocked any 3rd party apps that didn't come from the MS Store, even though it was a fully featured port of Windows rather than some cut-down Windows CE derivative)
- SteamOS (and derivatives) providing it as a "maximum compatibiliy" thing
(I never cared about this particular distro, but Valve probably thought this would undermine their reputation as vanguards of Linux Gaming by making it too easy for the average user to run Windows games without logging in to their storefront)
(Bazzite's website brags about running old games from disc, but all they do is provide a pre-installed copy of the previously mentioned Lutris)
Loss32 may very well be destined to upend Microsoft's monopoly on PC operating systems: turning one of the mighty testicular cancers of the computer industry into a set of harmless (if pretty ghastly) lumps.
If nothing else it's kinda poetic that a Swedish girl might abolish Windows as we know it today, in the same way that a certain Finnish boy's MINIX clone ended the reign of commerical Unix.
Cyrneko has some good ideas on how to move past Linux's current tangle of distro-centric package managers (APT, PACMAN, RPM/DNF) and annoyingly flawed distro-agnostic packaging systems (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap): but I still think there's merit to Hikari's approach of centering a Linux OS around a compatibility layer.
Haiku could be a good basis for such a runtime environment.
I'll admit that I never found a definitive reason to use it over the existing lightweight Linux distros (i.e Antix), but it has a lively community and might be worth leveraging as a cross-platform lightweight application library (and window manager, for that matter).
bonus points if someone prepackages said compatibility layer on an OpenBSD in the name of cybersecurity and calls the resulting product Yousai (japanese for fortress): and then someone ports it to smartphones under the title Dakimakura (hugging pillow) as a play on the old swedish joke of calling cellphones "yuppie teddies".
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