Slashdot Log In
Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Feb 02, 2008 04:33 AM
from the wine-keeps-getting-better-with-age dept.
from the wine-keeps-getting-better-with-age dept.
Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Woah! (Score:2, Funny)
You mean Blizzard made a game before World of Warcraft?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone keeps saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).
Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.
Maybe this Linux thing isn't catching on quite as much as you think it is.
(not trying to troll, just an observation)
Re:Everyone keeps saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the moment I am running on one of these [fit-pc.com], Ubuntu, everything just worked when I turned it on including sound, Youtube, several different browsers including firefox 3. Runs KDE like a champ, very smooth. While I type, KDE 4 is installing. Not bad for an embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server and just thought I'd try running KDE on it for fun, which turned out to work really well.
Oh right, time to install openoffice too, you never know when you might need that on a server
Parent
Re:Everyone keeps saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be comfortable declaring this the millenium of Linux on the desktop, i'd even go so far as to say century. Possibly the next decade could be the decade of Linux on the desktop. But I think it's too gradual a shift for there to be a single year we could look back on and say "that was it. that's when it all happened". This is assuming it happens at all of course.
Parent
Re:Everyone keeps saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Until they find out they can't run their kids games or some weird software they've already bought. Then they just call the neighborhood geek to put Windows on it. They might even go about it legally and purchase a boxed copy.
You underestimate the power of consumer laziness my friend. I can assure you, kids are happy with the games that come with standard Linux boxes. I'm watching mine having fun with Tuxpaint right now.
When it comes to serious games, you are just not going to get joy from the Eee. That's when I throw a CD into the PS3.
Re:Everyone keeps saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
Y'know, the odd thing is that I have.
For instance, we hosted several young British missionaries (these were religious missionaries, mind you, not Linux missionaries ;-) at our house last summer (I'm in North America), and they all had laptops (nat'chully). To my surprise, one of them was running Ubuntu. I asked him why he chose Ubuntu over Windows, and he replied with admirable British conciseness, "It doesn't crash so much."
I've run across several others in my church who were using Ubuntu when I met them (and that one Suse guy ;-). Yes, it's a big church, but it's a church, not an engineering conference or engineering club. Nor is it a high-tech firm such as where I work, where Linux is a rather commonplace choice, even for the spouses.
I'm no longer surprised to meet "normals" using Linux. I'm more surprised nowadays to find someone like you who hasn't. :-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The tendency for its partisans to distort the truth regarding the flaws of Windows systems has made me gun-shy of any OS that has these kinds of advocates. The article itself, and its easy debunking, are case-in-point. Running Windows games in either Linux or OS/2 (back in the day) was a fraught, troubled exercise. I wasted a great deal of time trying to get things to run, while reading fant
WoW (Score:2, Interesting)
WoW on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing which does not work is the Microphone - but it won't work the Linux version of Skype either so the trouble is elsewhere.
See my installation aid: http://martin.krischik.com/index.php/Main/WoWOnLinux [krischik.com]
Martin
Parent
hardly a good test (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, explain to me again, why Qbix and the rest of the DOSBox crew should be making emulation software for Microsoft, when they chose not to implement it themselves? It's not really DOSBox's duty to ensure compatibility for Vista.
The fact that DOSBox and Wine are around as packages to help install and run older software is a bonus.
Fact is, this software USED to work in older Microsoft Operating Systems... Yet, the article is saying that alternati
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The test was designed to test Vista`s compatibility, so the choice of games wasnt bad.
It included an old DOS-title, several Indie games (not optimized for Vista, but made for XP) and pretty recent well known game (CIV 4).
Im also pretty sure that DOS-compatibility is at least equal on linux as compared to Vista, based on my own experience.
I dont know about the coding quality of the indie games but i guess point is, Vista is not compatible to XP. Ok who would have guessed
Re:hardly a good test (Score:5, Insightful)
Let us take a look at a definition of flamebait (wikipedia): Flamebait is a message posted to a public Internet discussion group, such as a forum, newsgroup or mailing list, with the intent of provoking an angry response (a "flame") or argument over a topic the troll often has no real interest in.
As a professional software developer I have a professional interest in the performance of OS-es, even when it comes to gaming. My message was in no way intended to provoke emotional response; I even replaced the names of the OS-es with placeholders to indicate my argument has nothing to do with the OS-es themselves, but with the methodology followed in the article. Please elaborate why my posting should be modded 'flamebait', for I fail to see a valid reason.
No, I have said no such thing whatsoever. If apps written for A run better on B, it is indeed news. The article however fails miserably in showing evidence for such a claim.
My vision on another subject that is remotely related to the one we are discussing is irrelevant. Please stick to the issue you are debating.
Which was the point I was making, together with the fact that it is bad practice to (non-randomly) pick 5 out of a population of thousands and make assumptions based solely on those 5.
Lets take a look at a definition of a troll (wikipedia): An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response.
I fail to see how my post is controversial; I also fail to see any intention of provoking an emotional response. You simply calling my post 'trolling' has no relevance.
The only point the author can make is that for his obscure and very small subset of all possible games, they run better on wine than on vista. My point is that that says absolutely nothing about vista in general.
Parent
Re:hardly a good test (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see: the article is titled "Linux has better Windows compatibility than Vista"; it's even in the url. Comparisons between operating systems have (traditionally) high emotional responses in discussion groups (I recall comp.os.*.advocacy newsgroups in the pre-www days). Making such a claim (os A > os B) while offering the worst possible 'evidence' (non random 5 out of thousands) can certainly be called trolling/flamebaiting.
I have clearly stated why I think this article is flamebait. You have still failed to give proper argumentation why my response is flamebait or trolling. In fact, on my question: 'why is this flamebait?' you answer: 'you called the article flamebait'. So in your logic, stating that something is flamebait is flamebait in itself?
I am not complaining, I am calling for valid arguments. You continue to fail to give them.
Please, look at the title again. The title of TFA that is. The whole point the writer is making is that vista is worse than wine, because his non-randomly selected 5 games run better on wine. That makes it flamebait to me.
Please stick to argumentation and stop picking on words. The message I am trying to get across to you is that you have not pointed out why my response is flamebait. 'I fail to see' is a friendly way of saying 'you did not make it clear'.
Ah, now we are getting somewhere. As you might know we slashdotters are not able to mod or censor articles. On regular occasions comments are given like 'nothing to see here, please move along' or '-1, Flamebait'. They are not ment to really censor the article, but comment on its newsworthyness. Such comments are lingua franca on slashdot, just like RTFA, IANAL or references to the goatse man. That you are emotionally provoked by such a statement surprises me, to say the least.
Well, if you do not appreciate that, than do not accuse me of things I clearly did not. Keep in mind you have NOT given any valid argument why my response should be modded flamebait, so I cannot reach any other conclusion than that you incorrectly accused me of something because you did not 'appreciate' what I said. I find that a bit sad.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does he have a point? Yes.
Is the article interesting? Yes.
Is it biased? Yes.
Re:hardly a good test (Score:4, Insightful)
Game 1: Basically didn't work. Oh sure, he got Soldat running in WINE eventually, after tweaking, and gives the impression that it was unplayable. Vista 0 - Linux 0.
Game 2: Darwinia, patched to the latest version (a reasonable suggestion for any game, really, in this day and age) ran with a horrible frame rate in Vista, but "runs fine under Wine (even at a tolerable speed)" Not at "a normal" or "expected" framerate, but at "a tolerable speed." I have no idea what that means. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, but someone might want to share the fact that Darwinia is available in a native Linux version. Vista 0 - Linux 1.
Game 3: DOSBox under Vista hangs, and he says it's basically a DOSBox problem. Okay, fine...so he tries it in Linux and it also fails, though in a different way. In Vista he tries to shut off the sound in the config, and nothing, but in Linux he changes the config from SBPro to SB. I'd like to know, did he try that in Vista? (First rule of troubleshooting...assume nothing.) I don't think I can give Linux a point on this because there's just not enough information. Vista 0 - Linux 1.
Game 4: Civ 4. The author of the article says he's a big Civ fan, and frankly so am I. Great game series. He gets a message that indicates known compatibility issues, so tries to run it anyway (why not...might as well see what happens.) It hangs on him. Now, anecdotes are anecdotes, but my buddy and I have been playing the Civ games together for sometime, and he recently (within the last year) put Vista on his machine. Afterward we both purchased Civ 4 (I'm running it on XP.) He installed it, loaded it, and (drum roll)...it worked. No window claiming "known compatibility issues", it didn't hang his machine. It's not even a state of the art machine. We've been playing for several months now, and neither of us has had any issues with Windows "hanging", which suggests to me that there is more going on here than just a windows issue (even though windows could be involved.) He does say that after patching the game (there it is again), well, I'm not sure what he says.
Using highly refined comparitive techniques similar to those in the "rant", and given that my friend's experience running Civ under Vista has been completely smooth, I'm gonna give Vista a point on this one. Vista 1 - Linux 1.
Margin of error: 1000 games, either way. I don't care if one "handles application failures more gracefully than" the other. If I'm the average user who wants to game as is implied in the article, I will be as confused by nothing happening as I would be by the computer hanging and restarting. Looks like a tie to me.
Look, folks, I have no love for Vista (tried it, tested it, didn't like it), but this was about as scientific a test of Vista's compatibility as reading tea leaves.
And just to add 2 cents, I don't think any of those games were sold on the assumption that they would run in Vista, just because it's supposed to be backwards compatible.
I'm gonna go with flamebait on this one.
Parent
vista gaming (Score:5, Informative)
Four games (Score:5, Informative)
I also did a search for one of the games listed - Darwinia - first two results on Google gave me a link to an update for Vista on the official site/forum. If he's using that (which he hasn't said either way) and still having lockups, I'd have thought there's some other issue there.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista works really well with games (Score:5, Insightful)
Quake 1-3, Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2, Unreal (classic), C&C95, Red Alert.
I mean, if Vista can run a DirectX 4 game, 6 major DirectX versions later, that can't be bad. All power to wine if it can do it too, but to suggest Vista is awful with games is pushing it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
And you should probably try a few more games than that to be able to draw any conclusions at all.
Icewind Dale 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
I couldn't play Icewind Dale II in Windows XP. There are issues with many laptop input drivers screwing with the keyboard in that game. I couldn't resolve the problem, so I switched to linux, copied the Icewind Dale II directory, which was patched and had a no-CD crack, and it runs swimmingly. The only issue is that my linux cursor still shows on top of the game, but I rarely notice it.
I also remember trying to play Escape From Monkey Island(tm) in Windows XP, but there was this one part of the game tha
A bit biased? A bit of non sense is more like it (Score:5, Insightful)
First run; no go. Soldat stops responding.
Start explorer, go to soldat directory, open soldat.exe properties. Set compatibility to Windows XP/SP2, disable Aero for this program, run as admin.
Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network.
I'm not even going to bother and try the other ones. This guy should have done his homework.
Re:A bit biased? A bit of non sense is more like i (Score:4, Insightful)
The argument that Linux is too complex has been used for years. It still is, but once my mother needs to right-click on an executable and wade through options I'd say "Game Over" for Windows as well. This is not what I call backwards-compatibility as it should be.
To be fair, running a game using Wine is probably more complicated for most.
Side note, I had problems running Baldurs Gate on my new AMD 64bit dual core with WinXP 32bit. Graphics were wrong and sound mis-aligned. Whatever I tried, I could not improve it. Then I decided to run it using Wine (never used wine before) in OpenSuSe 10.3, 64bit and guess what: works like a charm.
Reemi.
Parent
Re:A bit biased? A bit of non sense is more like i (Score:3)
And that is why Windows is much easier to use then Linux. The people I know would already look at me as if I was a fish when I would try to explain step 1.
The last step (if I would ever get there) would result in running everything all the time as admin.
If this is your advice to people, you are to be blamed for all the spam I get.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How will emulators etc. deal with Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how projects such as Wine will ultimately deal with this issue.
"Darwinia for a whopping $1.40" (Score:2)
Darwinia not working under Vista? (Score:2)
Bad comparison, ignorant author (Score:5, Informative)
This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.
Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?
- Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
- I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
- I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend [wikipedia.org] even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
- I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.
That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.
Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.
Bleh, article is weaktastic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Damned if they do, damned if they don't! (Score:5, Insightful)
Compatibility Issues dialogue for Civ 4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Check to see if a solution is available on the Microsoft website
TFA's response to this? To not allow the compatibility shimmer to check MS's website, but rather run the program anyway, with the comment "If you [Microsoft] know something is wrong, fix it." This despite the fact that, to any sentient observer, the dialogue box is attempting to get him to let Microsoft do... Ummm, just that. Presumably the author of TFA would prefer Microsoft to break into his house and install newly developed compatibility shims without his knowledge, rather than have to tolerate the chutzpah of -- *gasp!* -- asking him...
Worst self serving headline ever. This fox news? (Score:3)
Re:Cant even start wine (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft bought VirtualPC from Connectix(?) a few years back; they now give it away. So just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I just popped up a DOS 6.22 window with Masters of Magic, a Win98SE window with Starcraft, and for giggles a Debian window running Americas Army. All run fine, simultaneously.
Of course, this is on Win2k. and Americas Army didn't have a great frame rate. but thats probably because the machine only has 1gb of ram and a Geforce4 MX 4000 card.
It also works on
Filesystem (Score:5, Interesting)
Merits of the OS as a whole aside, the windows world has seen pretty much nothing new except unmaterialized promises in the filesystem arena, whilst 'nix filesystems have experience regular updates and steady growth.
Parent
Re:Not a wine problem -- check your graphics drive (Score:3, Informative)
The NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver is rarely the cause of X or kernel hangs and crashes. In 2 years of using NVIDIA drivers on bleeding edge vanilla mainline kernels i've only had to wait for a new release *once* and *never* had a kernel panic that resulted from it.
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Darwinia on Vista x64. [photobucket.com]
Soldat on Vista x64. [photobucket.com]
Civilization 4 on Vista x64. [photobucket.com]
Blackthorne on Vista x64 in DOSBox. [photobucket.com]
TFA is verifiably false, and the title is misleading.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But, I am interested in one thing; what criteria do you use when selecting an OS? That I am curious about.
1 - It just came installed
2 - I have an investment in applications
3 - I evaluated it (on performance/cost/other factors)
4 - I trust the vendor
5 - It is the platform needed for a desired application
6 - It is the platform I suspect I need for a future application
or some other reason?