When distro maintainers started building and shipping 64bit versions, they didn’t include 32bit libraries. You had to make a chroot for a 32bit distro, then symlink those libraries in among your 64bit libraries. Once distro maintainers were confident in the 64bit builds, they added 32bit libraries. In the case of Windows, Microsoft created a translation layer similar to WINE called WoW64 (Windows on Windows64). Apple is the only one who said, fuck you buy new software, to their customers. Rosetta is the first time Apple didn’t tell their customers to go pound sand; probably not by choice.

Just supply the dependencies with a chroot. That’s how we did it before distro maintainers started including the 32bit libraries into the 64bit OS.

Just use a chroot. That’s what SteamRuntime is. That’s how we handled 32bit libraries on 64bit Linux distros prior to distros including them for gaming back in the day.

Don’t fall for his flame bait. Linux is the number one used OS in the world. Linux dominates every market except Console and Desktop. Once Microsoft can no longer use vendor lockin to artificially maintain it’s grip on the Desktop market, you’ll see all kinds of engineering dollars poor into Desktop Linux from OEMs. Look at OSX, flopped in the Server market (dispite being “technically” Unix). Apple shut down an entire division (XServe), because OSX Server sucked so bad. Azure is getting dominated by Linux. Linux has 80% of the IoT market despite Windows being free for IoT. OSX and Windows only exist because of Vendor lockin.

Same.

The goal posts keep moving. I remember when it was the Year of Linux. Linux dominates every market except Desktop and Console. The Year of “Desktop” Linux is what we’ve shifted too. The only thing that’s kept Windows the dominant OS on Desktop is vendor lockin. Windows isn’t even the dominant OS on Azure. How pathetic. Without vendor lockin, Linux would have seen all kinds of money for engineering efforts from PC manufacturers for Desktop. Sad part is, so many people actually think they chose Windows.

“You can have any color car you want, as long as it’s green.” - Comrade Car Salesman

I’m in the same boat. Just buy games. Don’t care if it’s supported by Proton. If it’s not now, it will be soon. That’s how I feel. So far, everything I’ve bought has worked flawlessly.

Funny how the “Year of Linux” had to switch to the “Year of Desktop Linux”. Any place Microsoft can not use their vendor lockin strategy, some you mention, Linux eventually dominates.

Correct. Azure Linux. They’ve been slowly adding to their Linux distro piece by piece over the years. It’s more expensive to run Windows in the cloud than it is Linux. My bet is, Office 365 will one day give you Azure Linux with a Windows userland and a Windows DE. 90% of the users probably wouldn’t even know the difference. The few folks whose programs actually need Windows will probably just fall back to full Windows while the rest of everybody just uses Azure Linux; saving Microsoft millions.

Windows is dominant only on Desktop thanks to their Vendor lockin strategy. Everywhere else, it’s Linux (except game consoles). Even Linux is the dominant OS on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Handheld PC’s are going to SteamOS. Even Microsofts OEM partners Lenovo and Asus are getting on board with their handheld PC’s. The reason they can do this is because Microsoft was forced to make Windows free on small screen devices (Build 2014). Linux has 80% of the IoT market. As Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy continues to weaken, Linux will continue to take over. It’s only a matter of time. That 1-2% is only Steam Gaming world wide. For English speakers we are about 5%. Which, consequently is enough to get Day 1 Proton support for many Triple A game titles. 3-4 years from now, the games that will be releasing will have been developed from start to finish with Proton as a first class citizen. The Desktop landscape will be wildly different, no question.

Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.

Yep, sometimes that’s the breaks.

Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.

Look up what makes a GUI. Something can be graphical but not GUI. Something that is GUI is obviously graphical. “All thumbs are fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs”.

It’s called a terminal emulator because it emulates graphically what used to output to a printer at the console of a mainframe. Then you got CRT monitors. The mainframes like the PDP-10 would output to a printer or CRT monitor. This was your terminal. A printer writes the output from the mainframe 1 character at a time, left to right, top to bottom. The CRT monitors were made to do the same. Obviously before outputting to a printer or CRT monitor, the output would show on a set of lights on the console. If you watched them change enough, you would know where you were in your program as it ran (obviously something only doable because the opcodes were not running in parallel through super scalar pipelines in the Ghz). With printers and monitors, you could increase the amount of feedback you get from the running or exiting program and give input to the system via a keyboard.

So, the terminal is not “technically” a GUI. We do use a GUI to emulate a terminal which receives the actual terminal output from the system and then displays it for you. They are not the same thing at all. GUI is a paradigm for what you display on a Monitor for the user to interact with. Modern monitors are fast enough that they can and do work well with the GUI paradigm. You definitely wouldn’t be sending GUI context to a printer.

So, if I switch the terminal output back to my dot matrix printer instead of my monitor, like back in the day, it’s not graphical right?

I use a DO droplet with docker compose. Filthy dev here too. Much cheaper overtime than buying and hosting home server equipment.

I hear you. the vi family, even helix (which is an IDE where the vi-like editors are not) takes quite of bit of use for things to just be natural. If I knew a terminal editor like nano but as powerful as VSCode that would be a great option for you. I’m sure it’s out there, I just don’t know what it is. But frogmouth is what you want to review the rendered markdown. tmux with helix and frogmouth is such a simple combo. I’m sure there is a hx/vi-like/vscode alternative out there. I mean, it’s the internet, guaranteed somebody else wanted that too.

Another tip though, since I think most people have never heard of it. Xonsh instead of bash shell. It’s a shell done in python. Then you can drop bash, php, and perl. Just stick with python. xonsh also has a wrapper for running bash scripts too, so you don’t have to redo old work. It’s worth a look to see if xonsh can simplify some things for you.

Too bad you are not a fan of vim. Helix is a good alternative. But, Helix and frogmouth in tmux is a good combo. Maybe nano instead of helix or vim?. https://github.com/Textualize/frogmouth

It’s all government and schools. You can see the trend for Linux going down and the trend for Unknown going up. It’s pretty much 1:1. Probably just changes in the custom distros they have that Statcounter is not aware of yet. Statcounter will update and things will go back to normal.

Naa, I was a Windows kernel dev for Intel a decade ago. We had guys that knew different parts of the kernel. Microsoft engineers know the kernel well. They have to, they have engineers from different companies fixing bugs and making changes. I had my contact for the parts of the kernel I was responsible for and other engineers had their contacts. You have to think, some of these engineers at Intel have been working on the same subsystem for twenty+ years.

So windows kernel will exist until everyone else leaves.

Yeah, that’s what he is eluding to. Microsoft keeps adding to Azure Linux. One day, there will be a Windows user land for Linux, i.e. Win/Linux instead of GNU/Linux. It will be much cheaper to run a Win/Linux distro in the cloud than full Windows. Most users just use the browser anyways. Anybody that actually needs a program not supported by the Win/Linux distro can fall back to the full Windows. Eventually everything will be supported on Win/Linux. Plus, WoW64 is already a translation layer for 32bit Windows applications and there are others and have been others over the years. A translation layer to run legacy Windows software would be nothing new for Microsoft.

Been using Linux for several decades now. I’ve always been able to throw in a floppy or a CD, or now a thumbdrive and just boot up and easily fix what’s wrong. Plus it’s rare to even have to do that. The times I’ve used Windows, when things go wrong, if it’s not a simple fix, best you can do is format and reinstall. I have friends who are so numb to that. But they figure, they might as well since they’ll just have have to format Windows and reinstall anyways because, Windows gets slower over time. I have one friend who had it on his calendar to just monthly reinstall Windows. I’ve never once thought, wow Linux is getting slow, let me format and reinstall. I mean, how can that even be an acceptable solution to anybody. Sure, if things just went sideways so badly and everything is corrupted, but that would be one hell of an extreme exception.