I was recently thinking about ReactOS, and how it compairs with Linux. Mostly because some of my favorite applications are unfortunately Win32 only (e.g. Miranda and Irfanview), and the preponderance of horrible Windows malware is keeping me on Linux. (ReactOS, for those not in the know, is an open source replacement for Windows XP, still in the alpha stage. More here. (http://reactos.org/)) The current direction ReactOS seems to be heading in is to use Wine for most of the graphical interface, on top of a brand new windowing system and a kernel that can handle Windows drivers. Now, this sounds great... But it's going to take a lot of work to develop. And meanwhile, we don't have a decent OSS Windows replacement. So how about we use XOrg and the Linux kernel? Those support plenty of hardware, and are fast and (mostly) stable. The idea is this: create a Linux distro (call it Winux) that starts Wine along with X. (Maybe have Wine compiled statically against the X libs for speed, or something.) Everything in the GUI, from the login manager to the desktop shell, would be a Win32 application designed to work under Wine; the default browser would be based on wine-gecko, etc. Windows applications could be installed on a per-user basis. In limited-user-world, everything would work through Wine and Wine applications (unless you decided to call up a Linux shell, for which there'd have to be an option). Root stuff would be done through the command line and text config files, as it should be. :) Now I know that's not newbie-friendly, but it would make things a lot simpler, I think; and anyway, the idea isn't perfect Windows compatibility, but an open source OS with good Windows compatibility in userspace. (Obviously, Windows drivers wouldn't work; but with Linux hardware support, they wouldn't be needed, and antivirus rubbish would be largely unnecessary, especially if AppArmor was thrown in.) And yeah... It would be a kludge. But I think it would be worth it. For a base Linux system... Well, the whole thing would center on the idea of using Win32 userspace applications in a Linux environment, so I think basing it on e.g. Ubuntu with the full repos would be unnecessary and maybe bad. Better to base it on something like Arch or Slackware, I'd say, just to keep things as simple as possible (the whole thing already being a kludge). But then, I've no experience as a distro maintainer, so my impression could be wrong. Anyway... What do you folks think of this idea? Feasible? Or just stupid?
