The fact that I don't have to deal with lib32-gst-plugins-ugly/bad/ect is amazing, but I'll have to keep 32 bit libraries for Team Fortress 2 and other online Source games.
Dont hold your breath. It’s just initial support. It’s still opt-in and I can’t see Valve using it with Proton by default unless they start supporting native Wayland clients in Gamescope
How about this then. While your neighbors are using wine, it attracts more commercial attention to develop the open source projects that you do actually use. It's so impactful that you measurably benefit directly from its contributions, like optimizations to the Linux kernel.
You don't have to agree with it, but you cannot deny the increased investment in open source projects it causes.
For a painfully blatant example see: Steam Deck.
Also for the binary blob purists, how do you feel about all that closed source firmware underpinning your pure world? Isn't it practically impossible to get completely open source firmware down to the silicon? And even then, do you trust the silicon? Are you running everything on FPGAs?
Hi! "Binary blob purist" here! Yes, it bothers us that so much firmware is proprietary, but we are working to fix that :).
It is possible to have fully free firmware on certain select devices.
The silicon is unchangeable, much like a chair is unchangeable. So being concerned about changing it isn't really productive. But, RISCV looks promising and a good remedy to the issue of not knowing what it does.
FPGAs would be nice but they aren't powerful enough yet.
But, at the same time, unless the silicon can make outside connections itself or modify behaviour (a la Intel ME), or has been updated with what is essentially software baked into it that can change it's behaviour on the fly, I'd say it can be trusted to do the computing you tell it to do and nothing more (again, excluding those processors where we know that it doesn't like those with the ME).
If you meant onlyoffice, then I think it promises better compatibility with ms office stuff and also itsinterface is closer to it, compared to libreoffice.
Collabora is a company, they funded some work on OnlyOffice which is a FOSS office suite like LibreOffice. I think they also worked on making it web hostable like Google docs (through nextcloud?)
Edit: Apparently now there's also collabora office suite?
OnlyOffice and LibreOffice are both very good. The former promises better compatibility with ms office files and has an easier interface imo. LibreOffice seems way more featureful
As for why fewer distros have onlyoffice in their repository, maybe because it's relatively newer? Anyway, it's available through flatpak and that's how I use it. I haven't tried Collabora online stuff
Is abiword foss?
It is the most reasonable of editors/wp I have found, LO gives me a headache looking at 1000 menus/items.
The gtk2 version is stable as a rock, despite of some bad wrap it got last few years.
All modules that call a Unix library contain WoW64 thunks to enable calling the 64-bit Unix library from 32-bit PE code. This means that it is possible to
run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation. This is called the new WoW64 mode, as opposed to the old WoW64 mode where 32-bit applications run inside a 32-bit Unix process.
Does this change run the 32-bit .exe using x86_64 instructions? From the description it just sounds like it allows 64-bit Linux libraries to be used in place of 32-bit ones, but that the Windows layer still operates in native 32-bit mode. This means there is still a need to emulate 32-bit x86 instructions which I don't think box64 can do at this time (x86_32 translates to arm32 with box86, x86_64 translates to arm64 with box64). If box86 could translate x86_32 to arm64 then this might work as Wine would handle the conversion between 32 and 64 bit addressing and argument passing into the libraries but I'm not familiar with the inner workings there.
