No Stupid Questions

It sounds like what you want is best served with WSL installed on top of win 11. Windows subsystem Linux will allow you to install any mainstream Linux distribution on top of Windows, but you would have to access it through WSL

So, both Linux and Windows comes with a component called the "Kernel" (technically, Linux is the kernel, and the OS is something like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...). This Kernel sits between the actual hardware and the rest of the operating system. It is responsible for things taking your app and loading it into memory, then handing the starting point to the CPU, things like this.

Since both of these kernels are developed independently, and basically from scratch, they work quite differently. When a program (app) is launched, the operating system needs to know a lot of small details in order to actually run it. What it needs to know and how to find it is quite different between Linux and Windows. Windows "Portable Executable" files (.exe files), and linux uses Executable and Linkable Format files. Your idea would be to simply re-arrange and augment the data in this header so it executes on the other platform, right?

There is a major wrinkle with this though, and that is the system libraries. Both the OSes have functionality to make it easier to write applications, provided by the OS. Things like sound libraries to write sound to the speakers, or graphics APIs so the application can draw to the screen. For Linux running on Windows, you can just look at what Linux provides and emulate that, or grab the source code and port that to Windows. However, the reverse is not so easy, because Windows is closed-source. Rebuilding every windows API from scratch is quite difficult, and made harder because the architecture is different, and solutions that are easy to provide in Windows might be quite hard in Linux.

It's this library gap where the value of Wine comes from, and how it works.

You might ask, then, if it's possible to run both kernels, and provide both options. Yes. In fact, this is how WSL on Windows works. It runs a customised version of the Linux kernel as a Windows application. Likewise, docker allows you to run a Windows nanosever, which is somewhat similar. However, running a container has more overhead than running the system API translations.

Running them 'natively' doesn't really make sense, in the same way I cannot connect K'nex pieces to my Lego model directly. The two operating systems simply have different shapes, and cannot be directly connected.

Everything everybody else said but also for a noob user, the window manager matters a lot. It's the part of the OS that renders the graphical user interface (GUI - menus and title bars and everything). Some are super basic (and often very lightweight / snappy). But KDE (super SUPER configurable) has a button for EVERYTHING. And because it's so configurable I almost guarantee someone's made a configuration that mimics widows aesthetics and interface, and that might make things a little easier for you until you're ready to dive in a little deeper. And KDE used to be way too intensive for most computers but most modern ones can run it easily.

Sure, someone could do the opposite of what Microsoft did: build a pretty invisible virtual machine that runs windows and windows apps. But performance would take a hit, you wouldn't play games like this.

Running Windows apps "natively" is impossible, by definition.

That said, I could imagine a kernel module that ran everything Windows in a microContainer like Kata. More likely would be to have Windows executables intercepted and run under Wine.

It's an interesting question.

No, such an OS would necessarily not be Linux.

You can have a different OS that can run windows natively--like React OS, but it's very much not Linux.

Wine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

1. Preinstall wine

2. Enable wine as the default app to open exes,.

then, when you double click on an exe you downloaded in your file explorer, it will launch and open.

Many of the user friendly Linux distros do this.

Of course there are caveats, in that if you run an installer, it might not show up in your desktop or so on. And any programs that need admin or have heavy drm also won't run.

Im addition to that, I dislike the model of downloading exes from the internet. Here is the other comment with my thoughts: https://programming.dev/post/48941029/23338730

Zorin has this feature, kind of.

Basically, it comes with wine preinstalled. So when you double click an exe, it will launch. Many softwares will work, except specialised ones like Photoshop or office 365.

However, I would like to mention, that downloading an exe and executing it to install softwares is an inherently flawed and an insecure system, and should be avoided. Even on Windows, people should be using MS Store, chocolatey or winget to install stuff.

If you would count running a python program as "running natively" if you run the python script through your python interpreter, then I would argue that running an exe file through wine also counts as "running natively".

Maybe you would be interested in ReactOS which is an operating system built from scratch to be compatible with Windows.

As for your question, you could probably make it so that it look like Linux is handling Executable files natively, but behind the scene you can't get away from having something that convert Windows system calls into Linux system call.

No bottles or ports, just download an EXE file and run it.

Manjaro does it. Imagine this: Distro mainainers came up with idea, that maybe .exe file should be launched via Wine by default. Crazy

My recommendation is to just run windows if your needs requires .exe. Trying to shoehorn .exe into an OS not designed for your use case will make you hate the OS instead of loving it.

Don't let some of these fanboys convince you that Wine/bottle is all you need. It's not. Most apps are well documented. Some are not and you will get frustrated when it's not.

I'm os agnostic. Run Linux and Windows depending on the situation.

there is a midge of possibility. but not today.

you need some vibe coder to do the clean lab linux versions of all windows libraries.

on a super high view of things, it's just a language difference.

No. The exe called specific windows apis that don't exist natively on Linux.

Just like a windows system can't run a .deb or .rpm application *nix can't run .exe natively.

I mean... "Linux", the kernel, has a different API to "Windows", so by definition, no, those are two different APIs a program would have to call. I suppose it's probably hypothetically possible to fork the Linux kernel to add support for Windows APIs, but I don't know why anyone would want to do that when Wine and, failing that, VMs exist.

If you configure Wine to open exes then it is as simple as "just download an exe file and run it".

Maybe you are looking for qemu, or the more luxurious Proxmox VE.

It is....

a Linux OS

...and it can....

run Windows 11 apps natively?

...run Windows 11 first and then run Windows 11 apps natively

Not sure why windows 11 over 10. Playonlinux did it pretty decently but apparently could not keep up with wine developments and is effectively dead. Steam has this thing where you can install something as a stand alone and choose proton versions. Im honestly not sure how well it would work but it would be realtively easy but not double click any exe easy.