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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it.

So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!

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Don't forget Windows finally made Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) a reality, Windows is the best desktop Linux distro (Android gets the mobile Linux distro crown).

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions.

Besides the many issues with the desktop itself, Windows offers piss poor filesystem performance for common developer tools, plus leaves users to contend with the complexity of a split world thanks to the (very slow) 9pfs shares used to present host filesystems to guest and vice-versa.

And then there's the many nasty and long-lived bugs, from showstopping memory leaks to data loss on the virtual disks of the guests to broken cursor tracking for GUI apps in WSLg...

> It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system)

While I agree that Windows has long since abandoned UI/UX consistency, it's not like that is unique: On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs. I'm sure libcosmic/iced and others will be added eventually too.

> On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs.

And you can choose to install GTK+, Qt, and Electron apps on Windows or macOS, too. That has no bearing on the consistency of the desktop environment itself (not on Linux or on macOSa or on Windows). That fact is simply not relevant here.

You could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle/preinstall incongruous software— those are operating systems that ship applications based on multiple, inconsistent UI toolkits. But that's neither universal to desktop Linux operating systems nor inherent in them. Many cases that do serve as examples by the definition above are still not comparable to the state of affairs on Windows— for instance, KDE distros that ship a well-integrated Firefox as their browser— are on the whole much more uniform than the Windows UI mess.

> could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle

Why does that matter if that’s not how most users do it? There is no magical dividing lines between a distribution and the user choosing to install a random collection of apps on their own.

'Desktop Linux' isn't an operating system but a family or class of operating systems. Linux distros are operating systems. If we are to make mewningful comparisons to macOS and Windows, then we must compare like to like.

But they are inherently different and not really comparable to macOS or Windows so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

For instance where exactly do you draw a line between which app/package/component is part of a Linux distribution and which is third party? OTH it’s more than obvious for proprietary systems.

> has poorly organized system configuration app

To be fair almost all Linux distros are as bad if not worse in this regard.

Things like YAST which are supposed to fix that are unambiguously horrible in their own right (extremely slow, crappy UX etc)

If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined today, surely.

If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined tomrrow, anyone's guess.

Note this is a huge improvement from 'binary is guaranteed to not work in the future, probably not too distant' of the standard model of Linux distributions.

If the API only has additions, then Microsoft would still need to convince game devs to actually use them (and Valve will point out that if they do, their game will not work on Steam Deck, so there's a clear downside).

If some APIs are removed, it breaks older Windows games. I can't think of any historical API that has been completely removed in this way - even stuff like DirectDraw and DirectPlay is still there even though it has been deprecated for decades.

See ABK deal, Microsoft has tolerated SteamDeck thus far, they own the platform.

What about it? I’m just curious what specifically do you think MS could do that wouldn’t get them into extreme trouble with the EU/FTC?

They could create a new interface that's somehow more efficient, and work with Unreal / Unity / Godot and a few others so it's just a recompile for them, but it's a bigger problem for Wine, perhaps? I'm just thinking out loud.

They “could” also create a new interface that's somehow more efficient for Windows. Oh wait..

I don’t think MS has the attention span for stuff like that. Especially considering the limited short to medium term payoff.

They could buy Unity though. Considering how mismanaged that company is it wouldn’t be such a bad outcome. Of course large acquisitions are very costly and risky these days.

If Linux gaming picks up and it gains significant market share then that is not an issue. Game developers will not use APIs that don’t work on the machines of ~20% of their users (or won’t make it mandatory, anyway)

Considering the alternative (ie. the native approach) would result in having very few games on Linux anyway that doesn’t seem that bad.

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