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Comment by aggling | Hacker News Reader

This is amusing but infeasible in practice because it would need to be behaviorally compatible with Windows, including all bugs along with app compatibility mitigations. Might as well just use Windows at that point.

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you have full control of a Linux system. win32/linux respects your rights that microsoft doesn't. that's the difference.

That is irrelevant to the feasibility of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.

It's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30 years and has excellent compatibility at this point.

5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not excellent compatibility.

Relative to (64-bit) windows 11, it might be.

How many of those entries have been tested with recent versions of wine or proton? Seems a poor metric.

Better to consider is the Proton verified count, which has been rocketing upwards.

https://www.protondb.com/

I would hazard a guess that most of those apps are garbage on Windows, too.

WINE has been reimplementing the Win32 ABI (not API) for decades. It already works pretty well; development has been driven by both volunteers and commercial developers (CodeWeavers) for a long time.

There are many programs that still do not work properly in WINE, even though it has been developed for decades. This in itself demonstrates the infeasibility of reimplementing Win32 as a stable interface on par with Windows. The result after all this effort is still patchy and incomplete.

There are many programs that do not work properly in Windows 11, so using Windows to run Windows programs doesn't work either.

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