Comment by gregman1
10 hours ago
(2024)
Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference.
Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. They are symptoms of a desktop market that Microsoft locked hard enough that the rest of us had to reverse engineer our way out. Market damage, not collaboration.
The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach.
No CS curriculum holds up Win32 as exemplary API design. No system copied it. A successful API earns adoption. Win32 enforced it.
Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it still works today without any modification.
With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking or some other craziness, or open up your source code and let someone else take the headache. Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module.
>The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach.
Windows has broad hardware compatibility, a stable enough application platform (see above), aggressive backward compatibility, a large developer ecosystem, and distribution through OEMs. Those are technical merits, even if they are not the only merits.
>do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking
But isn't this exactly what shipping on Windows looks like? I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".
>I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".
Oouch, I just got temporary headache just trying to read and comprehend the Windows mess that you mentioned here.
Now count up the .NET runtime dlls too!
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> With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything,
This is what you do for Flatpack, Steam, or Docker. All these are popular options.
> Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies.
Most distros offer tooling to make packages for their package managers. With them you declare the dependencies you want and the package manager does the rest.
> And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module.
The right way to do it is to open source it and let the installer compile the software against the kernel headers. Sysdig and VirtualBox do that.
You can also simply use Flatpak with the Freedesktop Runtime. It runs everywhere regardless of the distribution. For games Steam offers something similar with the Steam Runtimes. You simply develop for that one container and the software will still be running in 20 years. Even though, of course, making software proprietary isn’t best practice. If you make everything open source from the start the various Linux distributions and users can adapt it themselves for their distribution and eventually modernize it as well.
From the flatpak docs:
> A given branch of the Freedesktop runtime has a 2 year support period after which they are declared EOL.
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The Linux (and BSD) ecosystems are not geared for shipping binary-only software. Everything is designed for distributions to package software _from source_, so there's no stable ABI.
The point is not that Win32 is exemplary. The point is that it's compatible. More compatible, in some cases, than native apps for non-Windows platforms. A Win32 binary that runs in Wine is likely to work on more Linux distros than a native Linux binary, due to decisions made by glibc and distro maintainers over the years.
Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX also maintain excellent backwards binary compatibility, as do the less Unixy z/OS and OpenVMS.
Even though z/OS is officially a Unix.
Uh, no, a Win32 binary will run in Wine because of the concerted effort of thousands of talented developers for more than a decade, painstakingly reimplemting Win32 into a a compatibility layer for it to run on Linux.
There has been little to no interest in doing the reverse, at least until WSL, which is just containers anyways. (WSfU barely counts as an "attempt.")
I would hardly consider anything relying on a compatibility shim "compatible." Especially since Wine is not a perfect shim!
glibc is the main reason linux on the desktop has such a low adoption rate.
you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows.
glibc only targets one audience, one which can recompile its apps when needed.
What linux badly needs is a stable ABI for Userspace Apps, and Win32 is just that sadly.
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Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios.
Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux.
Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,...
I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it wasn't for gaming and .NET, I would probably be on macOS instead.
Taking care of Linux deployments is part of my job, so I know pretty well how it goes today, don't need the have you tried standard Linux forum replies.
It's not practical for game studios to target Linux natively, the best they can do is ensure their game works fine with Wine (plus, this gets them BSD support!).
I have several games from 10+ years ago from Humble Bundle. The Linux builds all have quirks (my gamepad won't work on any of them). The Windows builds work fine with Wine (the same gamepad works on all of them).
Plus, given the lack of a stable ABI, I can't really run the Linux builds natively either, because they dynamically link some library which doesn't match on my host. I need some special chroot or container (which Steam can manage). Requiring a container isn't any better than requiring Wine.
It certainly used to be in Loki days, what happened is that there is no money in the game.
> Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios.
> Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux.
It is a huge hassle to make a new build to a new platform. You double build system, release management, and testing. Compared to just one plat. Games are complicated, and testing all the dynamic behaviour is also complicated.
Making just a Win32 build really saves resources.
Also Win32 has been a stable api for a long time. Linux apis tend to change, and old games don't get re-built. The win32 build is therefore also provably a lot more long lived, compered to anything you build on linux.
Thats also important because of the Dont Kill Games effort and so on.
That reasoning fails flat given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox, which are completely alien to what is used on Android NDK, APIs that are GNU/Linux compatible for 3D rendering, audio and asset loading.
Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.
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Microsoft releases new APIs too, but no one uses them, especially not games.
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WINE was not the first Windows on *nix implementation. Sun had Wabi which was Win16 and was also released for AIX, HPUX, and Caldera Linux.
While Linux may be a pain to release software for, had anyone been interested enough, a solution could have been found. No one cared because Windows was the market and everything else was a rounding error.
Yes, and?
Which game studios were targeting Solaris?
> "...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java..."
Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.
Sun was actually a decent company once upon a time. Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money for so long that their hardware stopped being competitive, so that by the time Java made it so you could run some software on it, nobody wanted their hardware regardless.
It was only after they went bankrupt and got bought by Oracle that things like OpenSolaris getting killed off and Java lawsuits started happening.
> "Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money..."
That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Microsoft was trying to duke it out with them in the server space but Windows Server was just barely starting to become decent at that point so MS didn't get all that much traction.
When the dotcom bust hit, Sun went into a tailspin because of the glut of Sun server hardware from dead dotcoms at bargain basement prices. That eventually passed but by that time Linux + Intel was good enough to undercut both Sun and Microsoft in the server space. With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
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None of your opinion on Java changes the fact that Microsoft used it's monopoly to execute an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy on Java. It is well documented since they lost an anti-trust court case on it [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
That lawsuit was overturned on appeal. The DOJ settled with Microsoft's offer to publish some APIs, instead of launching another trial.
The Java stuff wasn't even the craziest part. The whole thing from investigation to the appeal took the FTC and DOJ 11 years, where they were unable to kill of Microsoft's dominance of Internet Explorer through lawfare, but it only took Mozilla and later Google six years, nearly half that time, for an open-source web browsers to have more market share than Internet Explorer.
It turns out that a better product was all that was needed. It's too bad that the Mozilla Foundation has changed course and is now adamant that Firefox be as unusable as possible.
Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good.
[EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave Hejlsberg the opportunity to create C#.
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It went the other way around. Object-oriented programming came out of academia, before Sun adopted it into Java. They adopted it full-force, making programmers jump through all of its hoops whether they wanted to or not, unlike C++ and Python where for most programs, the only hint of the language being object oriented is the syntax.
All true, but simultaneously, if you look at it not in the “how did we get here” but “what’s out there today” light, it’s an option that can run on a lot of platforms. Not by some particular merit but because history happened this way - but that’s not a problem with the technology itself.
I concur.
The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point.
And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute.
Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music.
That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.
If you listen to CS professors you'd believe that Haskell would be very successful despite having limited if none real world usage. The reality is that catering to your users is much more important than having idealistic system.
In my experience even with games that have native Linux support running through proton seems to have less issues.
> Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability.
I emphatically disagree. It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Microsoft locking down the desktop market. It has 100% literally everything to do with Linux userspace being a clusterfuck of terrible design.
Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. They didn't have to. They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck. But that's quite hard.
So yeah. I emphatically, but respectfully, disagree with your entire thesis.
It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude? You can sell crap like hotcakes with enough money and advertising minds. Yours isn't really an argument for Linux APIs being any worse or better quality.
> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.
WINE would have been invented one way or another because enough people would have wanted to run Windows programs on Linux in a world where Linux had dominant market share. For Pete's sake, there are Commodore 64 emulators for Linux in a world where that system has been dead for decades. It has nothing to do with what "works" or not. WINE and Proton are developed as actively as they are today because Microslop has been able to market so effectively to convince average joes and businesss leaders to buy their crappy OS. This has nothing to do with the quality of APIs.
> They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck.
Is there ever a situation where this statement isn't true? Everything built in software can be seen as sucking, and all software could have been written better the first time around.
> It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude?
No, It is Linux's severe failure that it lacked a singular, stable, and unified userspace GUI API.
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> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.
Completely untrue - Linux "adopted" Win32 because the majority of video games are written for Windows (and thus Win32).
They could not have invented a better API because the entire reason Proton exists is because developers don't build native Linux games.
> because developers don't build native Linux games.
Correct. However you grossly misunderstand why why dev don't build native Linux games. The answer is that distributing proprietary software that works on "Linux" is an absolute unmitigated clusterfuck of pain, misery, and woe.
Cross-platfrom is very very easy. It's a solved problem. There are indie devs with custom engines that can easily ship for Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox.
If Linux userspace had an ABI that wasn't garbage then adding "Linux" to that list would be very easy. The fact that devs don't and it is your primary clue.
I keep putting "Linux" in quotes because back in the day with r/LinuxGaming would spam Kickstarters begging for Linux support that's what they asked for. Of course there is no such thing as shipping for Linux. There is the Linux kernel and glibc and a kajillion different distros that are all unique and terrible in an myriad of different ways.
And it turns out that Linux is such a minefield clusterfuck that the actually best ABI is Win32. It'd be great if Linux designed a new ABI that was better. Seriously, that'd be awesome. But in the meantime Win32 it is!
> It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32
Studios don't target Linux, they target Windows and sometimes Mac.
Imagine if Flappy Bird targeted only iPhone, because there were only 50,000,000 Android users in the world (hardly worth supporting). Then Android creates an iPhone runtime on Android so people can play Flappy Bird on it, and you conclude "iPhone actually worked, this is evidence that Android is a hilarious and catastrophic failure."
the other way around is kind of how libgdx games run on iOS :)
I don't need to imagine a made-up scenario that doesn't make sense. We can look at what has happened at face value.
The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
It is not uncommon for indie games on custom engines to support Windows, Playstation, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox. And, depending on the game, iOS or Android. Sometimes macOS although that's increasingly rare.
Native Linux builds are pretty rare. Especially before Proton got pretty good with Steamdeck release.
Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively. So painful that emulating Win32 is a clear win. Valve's runtime helps a lot. And supporting another path is just a waste of time.
Very sad!
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winapi introduced event based programming to the masses and took it to the next level. You could argue that they weren't the first, but blanket singling it out as bad design makes no sense.
This control flow has been taught everywhere and is the basis of node's async loop (node waits on io, winapi waits on kb/mouse/timers) so "no system copied it" is complete ignorance. It is the first thing I think of when I'm designing an async flow.
> The ecosystem was not won on technical merit.
This is always the case.