A Sex, 2004-05-14 às 11:48, Niall Douglas escreveu:
On 13 May 2004 at 22:48, João Miguel Neves wrote:
And what's the advantage of using an operation system over another that is just a look-alike? --
If this were true, why use Linux when FreeBSD looks almost identical and can run Linux binaries?
Because GNU/Linux is my first of the two and there's no compelling reason for me to change to FreeBSD (the 1000% factor usually used in marketing).
Which is precisely the same logic why people continue to use Windows. Unless there's an obvious and compelling reason to change, the incumbant has a major advantage.
Fortunately those reasons are appearing and growing (viruses and license restrictions).
A free software clone of Windows would be immensely useful. For one thing it brings all the driver & application support Windows gets. It's also open source with all the advantages that brings like ability to modify, enhance & study. It would likely cost no money though that's not so important.
Why isn't wine enough?
- No binary compatibility with Windows drivers. This is very
important to most people
There are some developments like the ndis wrapper driver (which I think is a bad idea, but we obviously have very different views on how quick users can drop a platform).
- Few Windows games will run under WINE. And this is unlikely to
change as DirectX demands a certain driver architecture Linux isn't moving towards.
You do now that there is a DirectX implementation of Wine and that the latest work in X.org is improving in taking advantage of the hardware.
- No matter how wonderful WINE becomes, running Windows applications
under it will always be a bit of a black art. Most people just want to shove in the CD and make it go. This is why Linux is unsuited to replace Windows in non-server arenas
I don't get why this is impossible? Binfmt and things like nautilus together with wine can do that behaviour without any problems. I don't understand why you say it isn't possible.
And why do you think reactos will go further than wine on implementing win32?
Actually ReactOS incorporates WINE, they simply provide a "native" implementation layer - instead of calling Linux functions, they call reimplementations of the NT kernel API.
So they'll also have to help develop DirectX for Wine to that. Nice to know...