Minus the abilities that programs like WINE have achieved offers some level of compatibility with Win32 applications, WINE is limited strictly to userland only operations and doesn't have much in terms of hardware support for apps as well.

However, could native support for Win32 applications ever be achieved, even if hypothetically, at the Kernel level to promote not just binary compatibility with Win32 applications, but be able to run applications and other aspects of systems used by Win32 systems the same exact way as Win32 as an OS?

Just curious.

It's very unlikely, as the low-level system calls for Linux and Windows are incompatible, as are other OS aspects, such as the filesystem structures, the permissions, the way shared objects are loaded, etc. The only way fully-compiled Win32 binaries would work on Linux would be if there were some sort of interpretation layer between the binary and the OS, that translated those aspects that are specific to Windows to map to their Linux counterparts. And that's essentially what WINE is, a translation layer. The only other way is to recompile those binaries to use the correct counterparts, and that would require the cooperation of those who made it in the first place.

So unless Linux is rewritten at a fundamental level, it would not be able to support these binaries natively.

Theoretically it could, but it won't be (go on, prove me wrong!). Additionally, the system that resulted probably wouldn't be called Linux, anyway (Linux is a registered trade mark of one Linus Torvalds, and if you fscked up his fine work in that way and he probably wouldn't be all that enthusiastic about you sullying the good name....but that's just a guess of his reaction which might be slightly unpredictable, but can be predicted to be forthright.)

Reactos is the group working on a replacement for windows NT maybe xp by now.

Linux was more of a way to run unix on an x86. Not a way to bypass windows os.


The work on advanced x86 systems having vm support sort of makes the entire deal useless to corporate users. They don't mind paying for a MS license. That is a trivial part of any operation.