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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

So... this already exists. Valve already essentially sells this as a product. Folks know that, right? The Steam Deck is a linux box running wine executables as the native app environment. The fact that the money apps are all "games" doesn't change the technology.

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How they do it is by shipping a franken-ubuntu14 as the "steam runtime" for native Linux games. Not a terrible solution but not exactly ideal for general purpose software where games mostly keep to themselves. Their work on Proton is amazing though.

Wait, isn't Steam OS Arch based now?

There is three things here:

- Steam Runtime: A set of common libraries Linux native games target for multi-distro compatibility, I believe this still uses Ubuntu as the upstream

- Steam OS: An arch based distro pre-configured to run Steam out of the box, used by the Steam Deck, comes with extra stuff like gamescope to smooth over various issues other distros have with VRR, HDR, etc.

- Proton: Runs Windows games on Linux

Steam OS is clearly not what the blog is proposing, I can't just pop over the desktop mode and install Firefox via a MSI.

No[1], but you can launch a windows executable natively, link against DLLs in a compatible way, thunk between 32 and 64 bit as needed, access the Linux filesystem, network and IPC environment using native APIs, integrate with things like .NET and msvc runtimes, access native-speed DirectX emulation, etc...

Yes, you'd have to buff and polish it. But "paint some chrome on it" is hardly much of a blog post.

[1] Actually, are you sure the answer is "no" here? I wouldn't be at all shocked if some enterprising geek had source on github implementing a MSI extractor and installer

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