Windows or Linux

[mnrvovrfc]

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Take a look at QB64 itself, as an example.  How many of our commands are Windows-only?  What can you do in Windows that you can't do in Linux/Mac?

Why was it so much easier to add that functionality into the Windows version of QB64, than it is for someone to add into the Linux/Mac version?

Why do we find multiple examples of DECLARE LIBRARY "user32" stuff for Windows, and yet *NEVER* see something equivalent for Linux/Mac?  The wiki has a whole page dedicated to Windows Library Code, but not a single entry for a Linux Library usage.
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It's because Linux was unfortunate enough to be a "later" player than Windows, and QB64 recalls a somewhat successful product from the same company that created Windows and while Windows was developing into what it is today. The decade-2000 was a lot of settling for the Linux people to try to take users away from Windows and MacOS. Before that, they were trying to make it work so at least 75% emulated Unix as closely as possible.

My very first experience with Linux was plain Ubuntu, about two years after its first release. It came with Computer Music Magazine, a music technology magazine published in the U.K. It was expected they present Ubuntu Studio but I'm not sure if that flavor was available at the time. If not, then it's easy to tell the Linux world were just trying to settle to get it right, into a difficult road ahead to persuade people to try it at least, if those users were still going to prefer Windows or MacOS.

The distro came in an ISO which I had to burn into a DVD. I had to run it in live mode out of the very slow, sometimes erratic laptop DVD drive. It surprised me that it worked well enough, at least to do a little word processing. It looked good but different. At the time I only cared about it being able to save and load files into the same partitions that Windows did so.

A few years later, in 2009 I believe, I discovered QB64 which was at v0.84 at the time. It was very buggy, often failed with "C++ compilation failed" which turned me off and it caused me to still use M$QB v4.5 on a Windows7 laptop. I wouldn't have had such a luxury with Linux. Wine was at v1 for an unusually long time, a lot of things to get right only so people could play games.

It should have worked both ways, though: the GNU C compiler should have been even more important than actually, leaving M$ and ApCo to create subordinate products.