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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

> Being able to run Windows apps on Linux is a benefit, not a failure.

It is a massive moral failure though. It shows that after two decades of work, the Linux community has been unable to build a simple sane functional stable development environment better than Win32.

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Sane here is bearing a lot of weight. Developing on Linux is far easier than developing on Windows. I've never seen a windows project as simple as nq[0] or dwm[1].

[0]: https://git.vuxu.org/nq/

[1]: https://git.suckless.org/dwm/files.html

Huh? Does the mountain of software written for Linux to the point where Windows added Linux support to attract devs mean nothing?

Surely WSL is not a moral failure for Microsoft.

Neither has Microsoft, Google nor Apple.

A random macOS binary is more likely to run on another macOS install from anytime in the last half decade than a Linux binary on the same distribution.

Even Apple’s famously fast deprecation is like rock by comparison.

I'm not sure why you think this is a good metric; the space of "random Mac binaries" is far smaller. There's probably something to be said for this "curation," but you pay for it, both literally with money and in limited selection.

... which is much less of a problem for Linux than closed source ecosystems.

I don’t know; you don’t think having Win32 be the unofficial API is a problem?

It literally means Windows will always exist - as the preferred IDE and Reference Spec for the Linux desktop. It also means all evolution of Linux will be ironically constrained by Win32 compatibility requirements.

It isn't and won't be. So no.

Meh. It shows a good part of software (namely, games) is written for Windows, because the userbase is Windows, because Windows is the lion's share. And it shows people on Linux want that software to run. It's an admission, but not a moral failure.

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