[gregman1]

(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.

[liquid_thyme]

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.

[MaPi_]

>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".

[liquid_thyme]

The issue on Linux is that the distro's package manager decides which versions of shared libraries exist system wide, and this works well when you install everything through the package manager. Windows SxS is specifically designed to allow multiple incompatible versions of the same shared component to coexist without forcing the entire Windows install to use it.

But okay, I accept your point. However I'd like to point out that "the OS allows you do something in multiple ways" is different from "this is the only way to do it"

[ElectricalUnion]

> The issue on Linux is that the distro's package manager decides which versions of shared libraries exist system wide, and this works well when you install everything through the package manager.

Linux takes the lead: make code that depends directly on `kernel32.dll` exposed interfaces and you're in a world of hurt.

The problem pointed out is a distro, library compatiblity, packaging, or sand-boxing problem, not a Linux problem.

> Windows SxS

Now that's one very good Windows idea.

Nothing should prevent your favourite packaging/sandbox tool to present a facade that the file system has some specific files (your specific version of libraries) over some more generic files (say, Flatpak: freedesktop SDK, Steam Pressure Vessel: Steam Runtime) over some even more generic files (your actual distro libraries).

On the other hand, almost _nobody_ and _nothing_ should be touching "libraries" or "utilities" or whatever on my base system!

[liquid_thyme]

>The problem pointed out is a distro, library compatiblity, packaging, or sand-boxing problem, not a Linux problem.

Are you suggesting Windows users switch to Linux and not use a popular distro that can provide software they need? Otherwise, its simply a pedantic argument.

>Nothing should prevent your favourite packaging/sandbox tool to present a facade that the file system has some specific files (your specific version of libraries) over some more generic files (say, Flatpak: freedesktop SDK, Steam Pressure Vessel: Steam Runtime) over some even more generic files (your actual distro libraries).

If you introduce a new library in facade 2.0, its not going to work in facade 1.0. You can backport, but how many versions are you realistically going to support indefinitely? Its a good idea, but it doesn't solve the full problem.

[ElectricalUnion]

> Are you suggesting Windows users switch to Linux and not use a popular distro that can provide software they need? Otherwise, its simply a pedantic argument.

If you use a distro that can provide the software they need, why not?

Or, thinking in a orthogonal way, using a distro that doesn't impose draconian library management requirements, and allows simultaneous use of ABI incompatible versions of a library? Why not? Nixos is out there and has more packages that most other distributions already.

> but how many versions are you realistically going to support indefinitely.

No versions. No indefinite support. And intentionally so. The previous layers just stay there.

The point is to intentionally provide a stable platform - with known bugs and security vulnerabilities frozen forever - something people can build their things upon. And rely on the things the things they have built upon to not be rugpulled from under them at random.

Every now and then, someone might fix a egregious security vulnerability in the platform; someone might fix a egregious usability problem in the platform; someone might implement modern features on a older platform; someone might implement compatibility tweaks - but that should not be considered a given.

I fully expect at minimum to run legacy software on a sandboxed "compatibility mode", if one values the overall safety of the rest of the system. And if you are not legacy software, someone recompiles the software every now and then to the newer platform.

[teleforce]

>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.

[fireflash38]

Now count up the .NET runtime dlls too!

[rbanffy]

For every version between 3.5 and 10.

[RandomGerm4n]

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.

[Silphendio]

From the flatpak docs:

> A given branch of the Freedesktop runtime has a 2 year support period after which they are declared EOL.

[RandomGerm4n]

EOL doesn't mean you can't install or use it anymore. It simply means you shouldn't use it anymore because security updates are no longer available. You face the same problem with Windows software that is no longer updated. The only difference is that no one tells you it's no longer supported.

[liquid_thyme]

If my employer would still pay me the same salary, I couldn't care less about the license. I'm all for outsourcing this problem to the package managers.

[rbanffy]

> 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.

[liquid_thyme]

>This is what you do for Flatpack, Steam, or Docker. All these are popular options.

Yes, Flatpak is decent, but its a separate runtime with its own sandbox and perms that can sometimes make things more awkward for things like accessing host components installed outside of flatpak e.g. IDE running installed compilers, and compilers accessing project files inside the sandbox. But yes, its nice when it works.

Docker is the nuclear option. Fundamentally, I don't see Docker as a good and legitimate way to ship software (I already ranted about the giant bundle of everything approach!). I can also image my entire dev box as a VM and ship software that way too :P

[pipes]

I'm eternally confused by what an ABI actually is. Especially now that people say the win 32 api is the stable Linux ABI. Genuine question, what is the difference as they both seem to be conflated.

[ranger_danger]

A library with a stable ABI means that newer releases of that library do not break compatibility with old binaries linked against it. This is why old Windows apps still work on newer OSes.

For example in a typical C library, as long as you don't rename or remove any existing functions/exports (or change their signatures), you can continue to add new ones over time without breaking forwards compatibility (old binaries can link/call into the newer library and still work). This is also important for security reasons and not just application compatibility.

Usually projects will only make ABI-stable changes within minor versions, and leave the breaking changes to major versions where upgrading or recompiling the original application becomes necessary.

For C++ this is more complicated because it's all compiler-dependent (no language-defined ABI), and with classes you typically can't re-arrange anything (like class members) without breaking compatibility.

[pipes]

Thank you. So windows historically has been careful to ensure that it's abi is stable where as Linux relies more on users recompiling against binaries, which is a problem if you are shipping binaries rather than source code? Presumably package managers try to handle this by ensuring you dependencies are up to date?

[ranger_danger]

Correct.

[WhyNotHugo]

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.

[modeless]

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.

[rbanffy]

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.

[arcfour]

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!

[Asmod4n]

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.

[arcfour]

> you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows.

Sure you can! It's called AppImage or Flatpak or Snap!

I'm also not sure why compiling is treated as some taboo? It's not like Windows where it's actually impossible to set up a toolchain. Your distro comes with one installed! So that means you can run a single installer file, just like in Windows, except this is a shell script or anything else—and it can just compile and link everything for you, quite easily! The user doesn't have to know or understand how this works at all.

Why is that bad? It's bad to run binary blobs...! It's good to tailor your software to your specific environment and hardware!

[Asmod4n]

they don't run without a runtime, and that runtime is backed by glibc, they just moved the issue one more layer.

Virtually all software for the desktop is compiled once and then shipped to users and they never see the source.

This works for Windows and macOS because their ABI allows it. For Linux you have to target each and every distro like a whole OS and keep up with it or your app won't run anymore after a few years.

This is also the reason why Linux has package managers and windows didn't have a official one for nearly 40 years. So its not all bad.

[arcfour]

It's the same problem, just spread out to different layers...Windows had DLL hell too, and then eventually everyone just packaged all of their required versions of DLLs and redistributables into their MSI.

What about Linux do you think changes so much? Everything still speaks X11 or PulseAudio on desktop. More broadly, the standard library is...the standard library? What's the specific issue?

[markus_zhang]

I kinda see this as a usability issue. If the app developer is willing to wrap the whole “download source and then compile” with a one click installation shield type software, most users would be fine.

But yeah then they need to track distros and such. I hope there are a couple of distros that have better back compatibility eventually.

[WhyNotHugo]

Every AppImage I've seen so far dynamically linked some libraries, and wasn't truly compatible across Linux distributions.

[WhyNotHugo]

Use statically compiled musl :)

[Asmod4n]

Can’t run most desktops apps that way, nor apps that depend on mesa.

[forrestthewoods]

> 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.

[ravenstine]

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.

[lenkite]

> 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.

[adithyassekhar]

> No, It is Linux's severe failure that it lacked a singular, stable, and unified userspace GUI API.

Careful, some people are too hell bend on idealogies than making a reliable product. They'd never understand this.

This is one of the reasons why open source (free as in beer) will never work for anything serious. When my work depends upon a software someone made for free, there's an unnecessary power dynamic in play where since I didn't pay for it, they can rugpull me anytime. Before someone comes with the argument of forking, that's not how an economy works. I can't be the farmer, the truck driver, the salesman and sometimes even the buyer at the same time.

The kernel doesn't owe anything to the distros, which is insane, distros doesn't owe anything to the various libraries and vice versa, none of them owes anything to the application developers. It's a boat where each person is rowing in their own direction because they don't care what others does with their code and they don't have to. Because they are working for FREE®.

The effects of this is catastrophic. Everytime I try to switch, I can't find a single userspace application that works half as good as windows applications. People need incentives to make their work good, no one does anything for free. Free just means it sucks.

If microsoft/apple/google tomorrow releases their own distro, every single one will abandon their flavor of the week arch/ubuntu/mint/fedora for that one. One that's made by people in exchange for money. I bet the ubuntu developers use macbooks.

[ElectricalUnion]

> When my work depends upon a software someone made for free, there's an unnecessary power dynamic in play where since I didn't pay for it, they can rugpull me anytime.

I would daresay one of the reasons why Win32 is so stable, is because Microsoft itself rugpulls even stuff they offer as "improvements" and "better" (WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI 3, MAUI, Blazor Hybrid, WebView2 come to mind), so everyone else can't trust anything but the basics.

AKA: When my work depends upon a software I paid for, they still rugpull me.

[ravenstine]

> Everytime I try to switch, I can't find a single userspace application that works half as good as windows applications.

And if you do find one and update the package, suddenly you find the application has been severely rewritten with the new UI toolkit du jour and the developers dropped a bunch of features they didn't feel like supporting because reasons. Then these same folks act like it's all the fault of Microslop and Fapple that people don't use Linux distros.

[cmeacham98]

> 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.

[forrestthewoods]

> 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!

[MathMonkeyMan]

> 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."

[forrestthewoods]

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!

[Epa095]

> 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.

Companies end up not doing profitable things all the time, for many reasons. One rational reason is that while action 1 might be profitable, action 2 is even more profitable. So the fact that Linux is not supported does not show that it would not be profitable, but rather that there are other things the companies can use labour for which they think is even more profitable. If they could freely clone their employees (and "unclone" them afterwards) all profitable things would get done.

(This is just nitpicking about your economic argument, I have no reason to think your conclusion is wrong).

[forrestthewoods]

You are correct. You're talking about "opportunity cost"

I kinda touched on it with "and long-term maintenance". For video game ports you can bypass the direct opportunity cost by doing a rev-share deal with one of a million port houses. They'll do 100% of the work to port to a new platform, and then you split revenue. It's not totally free because of course there's overhead. And if you want to do patches, DLC, sequels, etc etc there's the maintenance cost.

Which is to say yes you're basically correct and I agree with you.

[arcfour]

> 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.

Funny, I have the same feelings after 5 seconds of using MSVC or looking at Win32 documentation. Or is it WinRT now, or is it .NET Core, or .NET Framework, or UWP or OLE or COM, or whatever the API du jour is which will be slightly incompatible and incomplete with the rest of the ecosystem in poorly documented and inscrutable ways?

Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. What's your equivalent to strace again, the one that's built into the system natively? There isn't one?

All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.

I guess there's a reason 80% of the servers in the world run Windows. Because it's so hard to develop for. Er, uh...no wait!

[forrestthewoods]

Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly.

> Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development.

Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll be great. Today is not that day.

Superluminal is spectacular. They're working very hard on a Linux version. It's taking them a long time because Linux is bad.

> All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.

Unity and Unreal do have buttons to export to Linux. Most proprietary game engines don't have Linux clients. Linux for headless servers you control is fine.

> 80% of the servers

Yawn.

The Linux pain is trying to deploy proprietary binaries that run on customer machines which are infinite in variation. Running headless on a single Linux image you control is very different.

Anyhow. Let me know when you ship a game with 3D graphics to customers and have to deal with all their support issues!

[arcfour]

Hey, want to race to install toolchains? I'll install everything I need to build the Linux kernel and, say, typical SDL2 applications. I'll give you a 3 hour head start, all you have to do is install Visual Studio, WDK, and the Windows SDK, and hope they play nicely with each other!

Good luck! Then we can switch places so you can install for the 5.3% (and growing) of your gaming userbase that doesn't use an OS with ads in it.

P.S. he who lives in the house of WinDbg is not allowed to throw stones. At anyone. Ever. Nobody thinks that it is "great," you must be kidding.

[winrid]

the other way around is kind of how libgdx games run on iOS :)

[ThrowawayB7]

> "...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.

[AnthonyMouse]

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.

[ThrowawayB7]

> "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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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."

Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware.

> With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.

Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive.

They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.

[defrost]

Original Sun hardware was rugged, operating mounted in truck beds running across corrugated roads rugged, optional full Faraday shielding for box, cables, and monitors tough. Really positive "never going to let you go" slotting of expansion cards into motherboard that resisted vibration issues. Fans that could go in a building HVAC.

That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed that field toughness was considerably smaller than the general office usage market.

[AnthonyMouse]

Because that's the market you can win when you're locked out of the mass market. But it's also not sustainable because then the mass market product will move up (Xeons based on x86) and you still can't move down with Microsoft blocking you.

Whereas if not for that, you could do both. Design a solid chip and then put dozens of them in a big iron cabinet for big money but also offer desktops with just one of them for prices that compete with Dell. Except that Dell's customers expect to open their existing Office documents and run their Windows API proprietary software and then won't buy from you.

[ThrowawayB7]

> "Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware."

Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the workstation market by the mid to late 1990s, having beat out HP, DEC, IBM, etc. It was their game to lose, which they did. And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

The main buoyancy behind Microsoft's push into the workstation market around Y2K is that Windows 2000 was much cheaper and ran on also much cheaper Intel processors. Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

When they were selling Unix and the alternative was DOS, Unix was better. Except that Microsoft did everything they could to keep everything tied to their own OS.

> Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

Sun was already on the decline by the time Windows 2000 was released. How many people were playing PC games on Sun hardware in the 1990s?

[jsiepkes]

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....

[ThrowawayB7]

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#.

[croes]

What does it matter if Java was good or bad? The point is Windows API didn’t win on merit but because MS attacked every competition

[bartread]

That’s not really true: it just didn’t win on the merits you care about. But it did have other merits: backwards and forwards compatibility, excellent developer documentation, and no need for expensive workstation grade hardware.

I don’t disagree on the skullduggery, but it’s worth bearing in mind that Sun, Oracle, IBM, and all the other big vendors of that period engaged in similar skullduggery. Microsoft was simply better at it, had better timing/luck, and therefore more resources and reach to play those games.

But one of those companies was always destined to become a scumbag monopoly: if it hadn’t been Microsoft, it would have been one of the others.

And the war to kick them back into line through OSS would have played out similarly, I suspect.

[dlcarrier]

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.

[dlcarrier]

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.

[drdaeman]

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.

[bruce511]

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.

[pjmlp]

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.

[arka2147483647]

> 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.

[pjmlp]

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.

[mschuster91]

> given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox

PlayStation and Xbox don't go and cause you constant churn, at least not in the same console generation, and maintenance churn on iOS is only bearable for app developers because there are so many people using it that you can afford to pay the extra effort.

[pjmlp]

Glad that we agree it is a Linux problem.

[WhyNotHugo]

> Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.

For a studio selling their games via Steam, there is no benefit in making a Linux build.

Their clients still need Steam to run it, and there's no practical different between Steam creating a container with a dedicate Linux userspace or with a dedicated Proton setup.

The audience that REALLY cares whether the game is Linux-native or not is likely the audience that wouldn't want to use Steam.

[pjmlp]

Steam isn't the only store in town.

Actually, Valve could do an Apple and require native ports.

Using Proton to run Windows games is no different of using MAME, UAE,...

[arka2147483647]

All of those platforms are HUGE and well worth the hassle.

I think Valve is trying to leverage the Steam Storefront into a full-fledged Platform. It is not quite there yet.

As such, they have invested a lot of effort into the compatibility layers, which allows gamedevs to support Steam Devices with no extra effort, or minimal effort, which is very important business vise.

As a gamedev, you essentially get a bonus platform for your game without extra dev effort!

[pjmlp]

Doesn't change the fact that Valve failed to create a business proposition to make native Linux a platform that is well worth the hassle.

[dlcarrier]

Microsoft releases new APIs too, but no one uses them, especially not games.

[pjmlp]

XDK, GDK and Agility SDK are also part of API updates.

[Jach]

And Unreal Engine 5 needs the Agility SDK, creating problems where games wouldn't run if your Windows version wasn't new enough. (Same as the typically encountered glibc problem of the user having an older version than the build needs, really.) (I think most of those particular issues were "solved" now with Win10 being EOL and so the developers just rub their hands of it and say "upgrade". Or use Linux and Steam, where no thanks to MS or the gamedevs themselves, games old and new can just work.)

Dependency hell comes for everyone, win32 may be stable but the broader ecosystem for Windows is little better than anything else. I say little because at least MS does still commit to a lot of backwards compatibility and ensuring some very old DLLs are still part of new Windows 11 installs.

As another comment notes some older Humble Bundle linux builds just don't work anymore on modern systems; some of those are just because they assumed a particular libjpg or libxml or whatever would be part of the base distro install and be around indefinitely. Bad assumption. But fixable the same way as missing DLLs from Windows builds.

[pjmlp]

A consequence of The Year of Desktop Linux Fragmentation.

[WhyNotHugo]

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.

[pjmlp]

It certainly used to be in Loki days, what happened is that there is no money in the game.

[BirAdam]

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.

[pjmlp]

Yes, and?

Which game studios were targeting Solaris?

[BirAdam]

No my point is, there were Solaris targeted proprietary applications despite Solaris also making a Windows compatibility layer. Linux is solid, and it is gaining some market share and such, but for a games maker it's simply not worth the investment. Finding a packaging solution and all that would be possible, but why? For 4% of the market, why?

Essentially, this is a financial decision within a business. It's no failure of Valve or anyone else. If the Linux desktop market share continues to grow, I fully expect this to change, but perhaps the answer will still be just using Win32 and DirectX.

[didntcheck]

> Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference.

"Win32 is the only stable Linux desktop API" has been a common observation in the Linux community for years. I'm not sure why you're acting like it's a Microsoft-sponsored smear

Microsoft may have indeed won first place via dirty anticompetitive tricks, but Linux/*nix would need a similarly stable API first in order to have won at all. And obviously plenty of companies and initiatives have tried (from Red Hat to Valve), and yet progress has still been glacial

Also nobody's saying it's a particularly good API, but it is stable. As "Worse is better" famously observed, the technical elegance of a standard has barely any effect on its adoption, versus more boring social and commercial factors

[nurettin]

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.

[gorjusborg]

Came to say similar. We should see the success of Wine/Proton as success hard won despite attempts to lock software in to Microsoft's business, not some triumph of design or something beneficial MSFT did.

[asdfaoeu]

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.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> The ecosystem was not won on technical merit.

This is always the case.