 |  |
|---|
Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
Posted on 01/06/2026 10:26:18 AM PST by ShadowAce
What if, rather than make a Linux distro that can run Windows apps, you built the whole distro around Windows binaries instead?
Loss32 is the most gleefully deranged idea for how to put together a Linux OS that we think we have ever read about in three and a half decades… but it's not impossible. Not only could it be done, there could be real advantages to doing it this way.
The idea comes from a blogger and developer known as Hikari no Yume ("Dream of Light" in Japanese) who made it public at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany at the end of December.
The gist of the idea is to run the whole user environment, desktop and all, inside WINE. So it's something like a bare-metal WINE sitting on top of the Linux kernel, with just enough plumbing to connect them up. This is significantly different from the current way, which is to run a completely Linux-based stack – the kernel, an init, a userland, a Linux display system, and a Linux desktop, and then run Windows programs inside that.
Nor is it just "a Linux that can run Windows apps." That's an old idea – it was the concept behind the Lindows distribution some 25 years ago, although the name got the company sued by Microsoft. Lindows became Linspire became Freespire, which is, unexpectedly, still around, and the included Click'n'Run Warehouse was pretty much the first app store on the web. There was also an effort to add direct support for Windows binaries to the Linux kernel, called Longene, over a decade ago.
It's also a profoundly different approach to emulating the entire Windows OS, as the ReactOS project is inching toward. It's been working on that for quite some time now: The Register first mentioned it in 2012, as far as we can see. It also reminds us of the Neptune OS project we covered in 2022, which is still in development.
It could be made to work. Even ReactOS itself considered a comparable approach. It's even possible to run WINE on Windows itself to restore compatibility with 16-bit Windows binaries, and there are efforts to make that easier such as BoxedWine.
Long before WINE itself was useful, Sun offered WABI – Oracle still has the manual [PDF]. Sun proposed making the Win16 API a formal standard. Later, Caldera offered a Linux version of WABI, and this vulture tried it. It worked remarkably well, and let us successfully install and run MS Office 4.3 under Linux with no VMs – or Windows licenses – involved. You can see some modern screenshots on VirtuallyFun.
Linux in 2026 is better at running Windows apps than it's ever been before, to the extent that there is mass-market consumer hardware sold for this, with an Arch-based distro whose selling point is its ability to run Windows games smoothly and well, and more such hardware is coming soon.
Much of this is down to the growing maturity of WINE, but it's not just WINE. Valve is sponsoring a lot of the work, including its Proton layer for running Windows games on Linux. You can check what will work and how well on ProtonDB. The forthcoming Steam Frame headset is Arm64-powered, but is designed to run x86-64 Windows games, thanks to FEX. A notable website aimed at this market, PCGamer.com, went on the record:
I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop.
There are quite a lot of layers to unpack behind the ideas in the Loss32 proposal. The name is, of course, a pun on the name of the original Windows native API, Win32. The name "Loss," and the project's logo, also refer to the famed episode of that name from the long-running Ctrl+Alt+Del web comic. This installment itself became a meme.
One of perhaps the less obvious inspirations is a widely discussed blog post from 2022, titled "Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux." This is a long-running joke in the Linux world, in the spirit of an ironic commentary on Linux compatibility over time. The kernel ABI itself is highly stable, and Linus Torvalds is notorious for defending this, but when you layer other components on top, it gets a lot more complicated. Even the lowest-level components: in the late 1990s, the transition from libc version 5 to libc 6, known as glibc, was a thorny issue and led to compatibility problems between distros that took about a decade and a half to subside.
Will Loss32 happen? It's too soon to say. Some people love the idea, some hate it, and some feel both, which we totally understand. But the bits are there. You could even boot such a Frankensteinian OS direct from NTFS – that's been possible for half a decade. Should it happen? That's a different question, but now that the challenge has been made, it may just be a matter of time. ®
When I worked I.T. 20-plus years ago we were constantly upset that Microsoft never went back to basics and rewrote their programs with stronger and more efficient code, opting instead to keep writing “fixes” on top of the existing structure. Collecting so many as to stop half-a-day of someone’s work they called that a new version of Windows instead of an ‘Update’.
Hence it’s still the go-to operating system for blackhat types to exploit because it still contains decades of sloppy coding that was never truly corrected.
Linux went totally opposite with open source and a community providing constant suggestions and feedback to keep the product efficient, flexible and actually secure. Never will the twain TRULY meet because you don’t purify water just to mix sewage with it.
I’m surely wrong somewhere in this assessment so feel free to whack me in the head with a correction.
LOL got one- hate it
I believe your assessment is spot on. As a quasi-retired programmer, over the years I either had a personal PC/laptop that was Linux because all of my work was Windows (including server), or my laptop was Windows because I was staying abreast with Linux through my work (i.e. Oracle servers). Basically, from a professional standpoint I wanted to keep up with both. Of course, I've had dual boot and VM's to have both on one PC, but I wasn't truly happy with those.
If I had to pick one OS for my personal needs and stay with it, it'd be Linux. But that's most, unfortunately not all. What Windows brings to the table for me is MS Visual Studio development (already paid for my VS 2013 LOL) and free SQL Server Express (the data files in even the free version can hold the closing prices of various mutual funds to experiment with investing strategies for me and my family and the financial small group I every now and then lead). Plus I use the SQL for studying the telemetry my solar inverters record every 5 minutes so I can determine if it's worth upgrading, and which portion, and how much, or if I'd be running against the law of diminishing returns.
It's been a while since I played with other free ones like MySQL, so maybe I'm out of date to say that I'm not satisfied with the ones that run on Linux (without paying out the nose for Oracle).
| |
|---|
Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
If you have the memory, install a Linux VM
If not for MacKiev’s Family Tree Maker, I would have absolutely no use for any version of Windows.
My desktop and laptop run Linux Mint and Windows 10 (which still gets updates) runs in VirtualBox.
MySQL (now MariaDB) runs and controls all of my company's HPC clusters--one of which would qualify for Top500 status, if we wanted to.
You should probably look at it again.
I like my Pop OS.
The only Linux I have used is Mint - Cinnamon. I will look into it more in 2026.
I will install it on an external USB NVME drive. Then boot to this drive to check it out some more. I use Windows 11.
Create a “FAT32” partition. Both MS Windows and Linux should be able to read & write to it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.