Or sad. As a user and developer, 98% of the differences between these operating systems don't really matter to me at all. They only exist because of historical accident, desire for proprietary lock-out, or other pointless reasons like ego. For anyone who didn't believe it, they've finally gone and given a proof by construction.
We've abstracted over the CPU nicely. Without even thinking about it, my software will compile and run on any modern CPU just fine. Excellent! But it's dumb that we still have to learn about the specifics of the OS, just to write a simple application. I wish they'd just pick some kernel-level API, some common formats (filesystem, executables), some UI-level APIs, etc., and then everyone could just write to that.
(That's basically what the web is, except the API is in terms of HTML/CSS/JS, rather than CPU/RAM/disk/devices. You know you suck at standardization when you're getting lapped by the web standards committees. It's easier for me to cross-compile C to JS than to compile C on all the different platforms I use. What happened?)
It seems like every couple decades, a few companies get together to try to make a standard operating system (Multics, Taligent), and it always falls apart. We're just about due for another doomed effort!
This assumes that there is agreement on what the UI experience should be. Navigation patterns, menu bars, keyboard shortcuts, touch gestures.. But there is still active competition between OS vendors on UI.
Just in the last decade, the most common form of interaction with a computer has changed from mouse and keyboard to touch and speech recognition.
> It's easier for me to cross-compile C to JS than to compile C on all the different platforms I use. What happened?
The web is a lowest common denominator. A web app is still missing a lot of affordances that users take for granted in a native app on their given OS. That is why still in 2019, there are new native iOS and Android apps being developed. Look, there are even entirely new programming languages being invented (Swift) or integrated (Kotlin) for the purpose of writing native apps for those platforms.
Specifically regarding compile C, I don't see what your problem is compiling C. You can even compile C11 on windows with Clang.
Yes you may choose to include a OS-specific header and it won't compile, but also your JS doesn't necessarily run if you call some browser specific function.
Yes, it is, but why? HTML/JS has a LCD interface. x86 has a LCD interface. Even filesystems sort of have an LCD (some superset of MS-DOS FAT). Shouldn't the OS have one, too?
If we standardized filesystems, executables, and syscalls, I don't see how our world would be any worse, and I can think of many in which it would be better.
If you write standard compliant C, don't use platform specific headers, and use some kind of cross-platform build system (I can't recommend CMake enough here), it's easy to use C/C++ across platforms. UI/graphics is harder, but cross-platform solutions do exist here (Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, OpenGL).
The biggest issue with CMake is how many libraries seem to have really low quality CMakeLists.txt's.
CMake is very easy to use, if you do things properly with targets. include_directories and link_libraries should never never ever be used, use target_include_directories and target_link_libraries instead. This way there is no need to mess about with shell script style variables for dependencies. But so many resources online explain to people how to do things the wrong way, and so their libs end up being a pain to build or depend on.
If your using stuff like MSYS2 does cmake/meson have a big advantage over old make/autoconf? I thought cross platform was the biggest selling point for these tools.
For me, sanity is the main selling point. Make has meaningful space/tab distinction - that's quite enough to disqualify it as hopelessly mad in my book. And then autoconf is just baroque.
CMake only helps a little bit (it's still very old and has way too many warts). But Meson is very pleasant to work with.
I wouldn't argue that we should be happy about how the web turned out.
It always feels like computers are stuck in the same place because every time we improve CPU performance, we end up adding more layers of abstraction so the whole thing is moot.
No, I definitely don't want one OS, or one UI or experience. I want one interface. We've already got architectural similarity between operating systems. The part that's different is the interfaces between them, for completely arbitrary reasons.
We've done this for layers below the OS (x86) and layers above it (HTML, JS). There's just this one layer in the middle which we missed.
Funny I was just wondering if you could run Wine on the Linux subsystem for Windows and run Windows apps in that environment. A complete waste of time and energy so little chance I will try.
It may be funny but it may be a way to support certain older games/applications that don't run well on Windows 10. For example in order to run Dracula 3 on Windows 10 one has to use the Wine implementation of Direct3D:
https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag
I've actually tried to run HeidiSQL through Wine on Windows and I succeeded.
The tricky part was the X11 server. X.org doesn't seem to work on the Linux subsystem, but there are a few X11 servers for Windows. If you install one of them, you can run Linux GUI programs.
Xorg works in WSL, it just doesn't have any backing graphics driver to actually render anything. But if you install XRDP, you can connect to your Linux desktop using the usual Windows remote desktop client.
But yes, there are better options. You can run Xming or other X server and configure it yourself. Or you can buy X410 in the app store, and then the only configuration needed is DISPLAY=:0 in your shell.
Testing across multiple .net frameworks without containers or virtual machines.
It's a lot faster to initiate an app inside wine on Linux then start up a VM and launch it on Windows. I think it's even faster than containers on Windows but don't have any data to back it up.
Lastly, for sandboxing applications (not a great security layer of course, but safer than running natively) so they don't pollute the registry or access sensitive files.
Wondering if it's possible to play dx12 games on older versions of Windows that don't officially support it.
Funnily enough, there was an article about malware doing exactly this for AV evasion some time last year. Existing behavioral analysis wouldn't be effective since they were looking at Linux syscalls.
> Microsoft's plan to invade cuba and overthrow the government has succeeded. One Microsoft official said "It's a win-win situation. The US Government is happy and shuts up the DOJ while Microsoft institutes a monopoly within Cuba for everything from computer software to toilet paper. One more step closer to world domination. Heck, we could feed a whole development department for the cost of one developer's salary in the US. They may not know how to create an Operating System very well, but neither do our US developers."
Oh my. I wasn't sure what I was looking at and then I read that to the right of the link.
It takes an incredibly talented developer or team thereof to build such a reimplementation. I wonder how much talent has been wasted chasing competitors' implementations in this way. That's talent that could have been spent improving the state of the art, given a different history. Ah, well.
to me this just proves that linux has won. (no this is not about the year of the linux desktop). for as long as wine exists we have been looking for ways to run windows software on linux, but now microsoft is trying to run linux software on windows.
quite obviously linux has something that they want.
