WSL vs Wine | Hacker News Reader

WSL vs Wine

3 pointsfreeopinion2 comments

A lifetime ago some Linux advocates worried that the advent of Wine would reduce the incentive to produce native Linux apps.

Today some people believe that the heroics of Valve and others have finally made it possible to use a Linux desktop for daily gaming, including playing Windows games.

I wonder why WSL hasn't made the scales tip the other direction. Today's devs could build AutoCAD for GTK and have it run in Windows and Linux. Photoshop for KDE could run in Linux and Windows.

So what is so compelling about Windows native apps today that keeps Big Software locked in? What does Windows offer these devs that is missing in Linux?

View on HN

1. The perception that linux doesn't matter because it's not a big enough market (that's changing, largely due to valve) 2. The simple truth that it's way easier to wrest control of the machine on windows - for tasks like enforcing DRM and licensing - if y'all look underneath your seats, y'all get a free kernel-level anticheat! 3. WSL doesn't do display well - cli is fine, GUI apps still require some interaction/tricks like remote X or similar (afaik - this could be old knowledge, since I haven't been in windoze land for a long time - at least a year) 4. To be a viable choice for GUI toolkit (really, the thing that's hugely different), one either has to use something that abstracts the underlying api (and often ends up losing something, somewhere, out of a necessity for a standard api) or manually write code for two toolkits (eg native win32 and cocoa is probably already too much for a lot of places, and if they were going to go cross-platform, the easy money is in OSX, not linux - everything there is paid - I wasted around $300 just trying to make a mbp not suck before finally giving up). So either you adopt and learn a toolkit you can use everywhere (eg Qt) and accept the limitations, or you write your own, but that ties you to an OS unless you really had an aim to bother with other platforms, and... see (1)

> What does Windows offer these devs that is missing in Linux?

A stable ABI. Then there are the specifics to the apps you're mentioning (i.e., decent color calibration support, memory management, display drivers).

We saw what happened with OS/2 supporting DOS/Win16 apps. Why bother with writing anything for OS/2 and lock yourself into a smaller market?

But this has been discussed to death on HN, if you search for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com