Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

WINE is windows reversed engineered. It is called "clean room" reverse engineering thus they reimplement the windows api without ever decompiling nor seeing windows source code but regardless its reverse engineering if it wasn't it wouldn't be the windows api and windows apps wouldn't even be able to run

No Wine is not reverse engineered. One of the reasons behind the Wine Is Not an Emulator is that they don't emulate Windows behaviour, what they have done is to write their own versions of "all" the public WIN32 functions and DLL:s and since those are public there are no need for any reverse engineering.

All you have to do is e.g to look here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-readfile and there you can see what ReadFile expects as arguments and what the replies will be.

The Wine devs then did this for each and every public function that exists. Their early work was the windows loader which they didn't have to reverse engineer either since the .exe format for Windows is also public information.

Now there are some quirks and bugs in the WIN32 API that they have to replicate but that is also not done by reverse engineering, instead its simply done by calling the same function on a real Windows install and see what the function returns, and of course based on bug reports from end users.

And what you just said is a long winded paragraph describing "clean room" reverse engineering... the very meaning of it. all emulators that are legal do it.. they write their own code to do the same things as what they are trying to emulate. I know WINE is not an Emulator but the acronym isn't telling you its not an emulator cause they write their own code but the fact its a translation layer

"Clean room reverse engineering" =/= "reverse engineering".
"Clean room reverse engineering" cannot even be seen as a subset of "reverse engineering", because the former treats the target as a black box to reimplement, while the latter explicitely disassebles it to understand how it works from the inside.
So Wine is NOT a reverse engineering attempt of the Windows executables and libraries.

Btw, apart from definitions, I think the concept seems clear to everyone.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway, now the only people learning anything about Linux will be three guys at Google developing a compatibility layer. Game developers will just be targeting Windows as usual. So who gives a damn? And since they're inventing their own little wheel (again), they won't be contributing much upstream . . . maybe a bit to DXVK.

What feels even worse here, that they benefit from the work that already went into faudio, dxvk (I assume also vkd3d-proton, since I doubt they don't care about DX12 games) and other similar important projects. Yet they don't give their project back to FOSS at large and Linux gaming in particular. It's Google we are talking about with their money. When they act in parasitic manner while benefiting from open source projects, it just starts feeling disgusting.

Which is what really pisses me off here.. Anyone with more then two brain cells knows no matter their lie WINE is at this core of this project and it takes hundreds if not thousands of folks contributing to WINE to have WINE in the state it is in and here they are with a mere three devs are trying to claim they have done in months from the ground up outside of the DXVK and FAudio what it has taken WINE decades to do.. taking others work for their own at least Valve contributes back and doesn't claim the code in proton as their own

Yea I don't buy it and hope this blows up in their face in some manner and Stadia crashes and burns

I'm not that sure.
If I were Mr. Google using wine to build Stadia, I'd certainly not published "hey, i'm not using wine, i'm doing from scratch!".

I'm not even sure why they are even talking about this project, now that i think of it.

I can assure you they are using WINE code.. There is NO company outside Microsoft that can make a Windows compatibility layer in mere months I don't care how large Google is they are simply taking/modifying code and claiming it as 100% their own

It is not a windows compatibilty layer.
It is just an unreal+unity for windows compatibility layer, with a lot of work already done by dxvk and Faudio.
Feral and others already did that without even using them.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway, now the only people learning anything about Linux will be three guys at Google developing a compatibility layer. Game developers will just be targeting Windows as usual. So who gives a damn? And since they're inventing their own little wheel (again), they won't be contributing much upstream . . . maybe a bit to DXVK.

What feels even worse here, that they benefit from the work that already went into faudio, dxvk (I assume also vkd3d-proton, since I doubt they don't care about DX12 games) and other similar important projects. Yet they don't give their project back to FOSS at large and Linux gaming in particular. It's Google we are talking about with their money. When they act in parasitic manner while benefiting from open source projects, it just starts feeling disgusting.

Which is what really pisses me off here.. Anyone with more then two brain cells knows no matter their lie WINE is at this core of this project and it takes hundreds if not thousands of folks contributing to WINE to have WINE in the state it is in and here they are with a mere three devs are trying to claim they have done in months from the ground up outside of the DXVK and FAudio what it has taken WINE decades to do.. taking others work for their own at least Valve contributes back and doesn't claim the code in proton as their own

Yea I don't buy it and hope this blows up in their face in some manner and Stadia crashes and burns

I'm not that sure.
If I were Mr. Google using wine to build Stadia, I'd certainly not published "hey, i'm not using wine, i'm doing from scratch!".

I'm not even sure why they are even talking about this project, now that i think of it.

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What a waste of resources.
They are targetting 2 engines that already provide Linux support.

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Last time i tried, to have a readable text on screen far from you (couch in the living room, anybody?), you needed a mod.
If this is not changed, i really hope it is on the #1 position on the list of the things to do.

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Quoting: elmapulthere is an advantage on windows, at least on general hardware:
windows can hot-swap drivers, linux cant AFAIK.

Actually, you can not only swap them on linux, but even keep them together and choose what to use runtime, at least with amd.

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Quoting: Maximilian_KorberHow curious.

Ahah, your avatar next to that sentence is hilarious in this particular context

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If I understood properly, what is changed is that Valve just verified what we already know, or there is more?

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Quoting: furaxhornyxIn addition to this excellent comment, I would like to add that there would be way less people using smartphones, consoles, cars, and whatnot, if they had to resort to command line to use them (and this comes from someone who launched a lot of games as run"mygame" on an Amstrad CPC as a young kid)

When it comes to command line usage in a standard consumer environment, Linux IS the exception ; everything else has a nice GUI to guide the user.

What you seem to miss here, is that the command line is not only something that can save your ass when you exhausted other UI solutions,, but a resource per se that can be used to do certain tasks much better than a gui would ever do.
And expressly avoiding even to name it because some people fear it is not something that meet my approval.
That said, nobody thinks that a shell prompt can do anything; fact is that for every task there is a tool better than another, and how is it easy to use is something that depends on the experience and competence already in place, not on the presence of a gui instead of a text.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAn insult doesn't actually stop being one just from saying "no offense" after.

Writing "no offense" literally means "i don't want to offend", so if you feel offended, probably you're getting it wrong.
And yes, an insult is made to offend, but since i didn't mean to, the premise of it being an insult is wrong.
If you felt offended because you think i was insulting someone, i apologize; probably i expressed myself bad, so you got it wrong.

Quoting: kokoko3kThe sooner the people will understand that, the sooner we can progress instead of involve into dumbness

See the use of "we" instead of "you"? I mean everyone, "me" included, but mostly.. "we".
See the use of the verb "to involve"? I'm not an english native speaker, but i think it can be used to express the process of involution; indeed, the writing was addressed mostly to the ones that already are able to use the terminal today;

So let me rephrase:
If I am able to use the terminal, but no one write interesting articles that stimulate that skill because he thinks that it is better to not use it, because there are users unable to use it, then my skill will vanish with the time and my unavoidable involution into dumbness (referred to the act of loosing a skill) will be faster.

QuoteBut you sound like one of those people who gets hot under the collar about nobody understanding how to do simple maintenance on their cars, failing to understand that lots of people don't bloody want to do simple maintenance on their cars.

Nope, people can do whatever they want with their cars, but if my car is powered by -insert a particular fuel here-, i'd like to find it so that i can continue to use my car, or my car would become a dumb/useless car and i'll need to change the whole thing or at least its fueling devices.

To not repeat myself, I beg you to read my other answers in this thread from the beginning to better understand, instead of just decontextualize them, thank you very much.

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