On 15 Apr 2003, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
I think that project has already started, it is named ReactOS...
:) Point taken :)
Of course it's not based on Linux, but with your approach there's no real reason to use Linux anyway since everything goes through the Win32 API, you might as well use a Win32 kernel too.
Of course there is a reason, there is a lot more to an OS then the GUI. I do a lot more than edit files in Word or Excel. What about the command line and all the utilities? The non-braindead filesystem? And so on, and so forth. The Win32 API is almost synonymous with GUI programming. For that, it works just fine. There's no reason for deamons, utilities, etc. to be written to the Win32 API. The Unix one is perfect there. It's exactly what it was designed to do. In fact, not even apps need to use the Win32 app directly -- as I said, only the toolkits will need to be written to them. wxWindows is already done, it's not such a drastic proposition, is it?
Really Alexandre, who cares what toolkit an app uses? If we do, we repeat the mistakes done in Java with Swing. That killed Java on the desktop, because it exposed an implementation detail. People care about apps integrating in their current setting, they don't give a rat's ass in which language, toolkit, IDE, etc. the app was written. Take Audacity for example, it's written on top of wxWindows, do you think anyone would care if wxWindows would use Wine to render instead of GTK? (Assuming the rendering matches the current theme, like BlueCurve)?