What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

What if, rather than make a Linux distro that can run Windows apps, you built the whole distro around Windows binaries instead?

Loss32 is the most gleefully deranged idea for how to put together a Linux OS that we think we have ever read about in three and a half decades… but it's not impossible. Not only could it be done, there could be real advantages to doing it this way.

The idea comes from a blogger and developer known as Hikari no Yume ("Dream of Light" in Japanese) who made it public at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany at the end of December.

The gist of the idea is to run the whole user environment, desktop and all, inside WINE. So it's something like a bare-metal WINE sitting on top of the Linux kernel, with just enough plumbing to connect them up. This is significantly ...