First Release Candidate of Wine 1.0 Released

moronikos writes to mention that the first release candidate of Wine 1.0 was announced and released into the wild today. This new version includes only bug fixes as the team is in a code freeze while pushing for the full 1.0 release.

Re:Wait, What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it wouldn't have to be done to work better than windows...

So what's the definition?

[Zarhan]

I mean, I've been running Windows software under WINE for *years*. What's their definition of "1.0"? Does it really mean anything, or will we be getting 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc monthly afterwards anyway just like before? Or is 1.0 some "complete feature set" release, suggesting that I can now run any windows software (I doubt that's true, considering that even MS Office is still a bit shaky).

http://www.winehq.org/?announce=1.0-rc1 [winehq.org] pretty much has a list of bugfixes&features, just like any other release. Where's the beef in "1.0"?

Re:serious question

[1336]

"Why would I want to use Wine when I can just run windows in a virtual machine?"

You don't have a lot of spare RAM? (e.g. using VirtualBox requires enough RAM for the host OS + the RAM for the virtualized OS + the RAM for the app running in it; with Wine you eliminate the need for the virtualized OS)

You don't want to buy a Windows license/pirate Windows for a single app? (or more generally, you don't want Microsoft code on your system if you can help it? :)

Hooray! Long live Wine 1.0!

[linebackn]

I think this is great Wine is finally reaching "1.0". I am hoping this version will be treated as a longer lived, stable, supported branch. This way developers might seriously target Wine as a platform or at least consider it a real "Microsoft Windows Compatible" target (Yea, it would be better if ports of apps were targeted to be Linux or Mac OS X native)

Sure it won't run all Windows apps perfectly - but then again, neither does Windows! There are lots of apps out there that have various bad code that often shouldn't even run at all but somehow gets away with working under a generic Windows XP install. Then they crash under Wine, Windows Vista, or even XP under odd configurations. And then there are the ones that do things different under different versions of Windows to get around bugs or varying behavior in Windows.

Also having a longer lived "1.0" branch would mean tips and tricks to getting individual programs to run would not become obsolete quite as quickly, and a Wine "1.0" users would not have to worry as much about apps breaking every few weeks.

At any rate, Wine has come a very long way - I remember when it was just trying to be a Windows 3.1 clone!

Re:Wait, What?!

[TekPolitik]

being considered a 1.0 version seems to me like it shouldn't happen until it can at least come close to running most everything thrown at it.

Nah, it just has to run more old Windows apps than the latest version of Vista. I think Wine as it was 10 years ago met that requirement.

Re:Y'know

[Haeleth]

Well, yeah, it depends on what you need, doesn't it? What you say is true for many, maybe even most people, but that doesn't mean nobody needs Wine.

If you have to interoperate with Windows users who use specific software, and the Linux equivalents can't read/write files from that software sufficiently well for your purposes, then you may still find yourself looking for a way to run the Windows programs. This used to be the case a lot with MS Office; modern Linux office apps are pretty good at interoperating, so it's not an issue so much, though there are still a few rare cases where the Linux software won't be able to duplicate what MS Office does quite well enough. (Complex VBA macros that automate other Windows applications, for example. Though I don't know offhand whether Wine can handle those either, and frankly anyone who uses them deserves the pain they cause :)

Then there are the cases where the Linux programs are genuinely inferior. Again it's a question of whether that actually matters. For example, GIMP is good enough for most casual users and even many professionals, but still a lot of people are inevitably going to find there are things they need that it doesn't do, and then they're going to want a way to run Photoshop.

And finally we have the fundamental matter of freedom of choice. Some people just prefer various proprietary Windows applications, and it's good that they can have the freedom to choose to retain those, even if the Linux equivalent would work just as well. Linux is all about the freedom to use your computer how you like, after all!

Re:Infinite Loop

[Yetihehe]

You will be eaten by a grue.

Re:What does 1.0 mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine 1.0 means it can flawlessly run the following programs:
Photoshop CS2, Powerpoint Viewer 97 and 2003, Word Viewer 97 and 2003 and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003.

Re:but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not familiar with MAME, but the other you mention are emulators, in that they perform byte-code interpreting of the program code (I guess MAME does too). Wine does not, it only provides an ABI-compatible implementation of (most of) the WIN32 API.

If Wine would be an emulator, it would run equally well on PowerPC or SPARC hardware. It does not, you need the exact same hardware that the original program was intended for.

Finally, for the semantically pedantic: yes, recent versions of Dosbox also have a "dynamic" execution mode which tries to do the same that wine does. Naturally, it only works when running Dosbox on x86-compatible hardware.

Re:Hooray! Long live Wine 1.0!

[Anonymous Coward]

(not that the Windows API is anything like a standard)

You're wrong. There are two types of standards: De jure (ISO and alike) and de facto standards. Win32 API is THE de facto standard for desktop applications. If you want your software to run on 95% of desktop computers you either adhere to that standard or be obscure. Wine is a chance for Linux to be less obscure on the desktop (it is more or less a successful server OS now, on desktop it has been around 0.5% and not growing).

Re:but...

[poopdeville]

I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you this: Anybody with a strong opinion on the matter is full of shit.

Re:serious question

[Bert64]

But you can download the direct3d runtime from microsoft without having to buy windows...

Re:Y'know

[uglyduckling]

I've been using various flavours of Linux as my primary OS for seven years now, switched from Windows 98SE / Windows 2000 back in the day. Seven years later there's still nothing that compares with Dreamweaver for fast standards-compliant web development and Indesign for printed media.

Now I've got a bit more money and don't want to spend my weekends battling with substandard software to do the bits and pieces of pro bono web and print design I do in my spare time I've convinced my wife to let me buy a Mac Mini and a copy of Adobe Design Premium CS3.

I'll miss Ubuntu but I really need to be able to sit down at my computer and just get the job done. I know there's software that can do the job, but I'm constantly having to work-around the limitations of the software. I'm perfectly capable of hand-editing HTML/CSS but I'd much rather concentrate on the design in Dreamweaver and the tidy up the code by hand at the end if there's anything I'm not happy with.

I had hoped that Linux would have decent commercial software available by now, or that Wine would run 99% of Windows software, but it's just not the case. In the meantime OS X has become a stable, well-supported and above all Unix-based OS that does everything I need without getting in the way. I still love Linux, will probably still run Ubuntu on my laptop (had Vista Ultimate on it for the past 4 months -- aweful, really really aweful...) and have a 3-head MythTV (mythbuntu) setup that keeps me happy. (When I plead for that Mac Pro in a year's time the Mac Mini will make a great MythTV head).

Re:Hooray! Long live Wine 1.0!

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE could be stabilized into a fairly complete API, even if it's a subset of the more obscure win32 world. Developers would then be in a position to target it in a similar fashion to Carbon on OSX, which allowed apps to run on both OS9 and OSX in a fairly consistent way. Oddball corporate apps could be migrated with less expense than a full rewrite.

Re:Y'know

[TheRaven64]

Emphasis mine:

there are Linux equivalents for pretty much everything

And that's the killer. If 95% of what you need runs on one platform but 100% runs on another, which will you choose? I know businesses that are still running Windows 9x, out of support, because it still works and it runs their in-house VB4 application. If Linux (or FreeBSD or Solaris or whatever) can also run this VB4 application - for which there is no non-Windows equivalent because it was developed in house for a specific purpose relevant only to that company - then they can consider these platforms for their upgrade when they do finally get around to it. If not then they're locked in.

The point of WINE is that, for a lot of people, there is one important app keeping them on Windows that has no open alternative. Without WINE, they have to keep a windows [virtual] machine around. With it, they can switch.

Thank you, Wine developers!

[JediTrainer]

I'd like the opportunity to thank all of you who have been working hard on Wine all these years.

Recently Wine has saved my butt at work when my Windows machine auto-upgraded me to IE 7 (even though I have auto updates turned off). I was hard-pressed, then, to be able to reproduce a JavaScript bug that apparently was only present on IE 6 (and not 7, nor FF or Opera).

Being able to install IE 6 on my Ubuntu box was a godsend, and it worked well enough that I was able to reproduce the bug and fix it.

Kudos to you guys for your fabulous work, and thank you!

Re: serious question

[Dolda2000]

Why would I want to use Wine when I can just run windows in a virtual machine?

Because you...

• ...don't have a copy of Windows to install and don't want to buy one.
• ...want the application window to use your normal X11 window manager rather than having to have an entire Windows environment with start menu and everything.
• ...don't want to wait for Windows to boot every time you want to run the application.
• ...want to run an application using 3D.
• ...don't have VMX hardware and don't want to shell out money for VMware.
• ...don't want the overhead of emulating the entire hardware.

I won't argue the reason that you don't want to run proprietary software, because if you're running Windows applications, that's probably not your problem. However, even so, I would feel it would be nice to be able to run e.g. a game without necessarily making my system a nest of evil. I've always felt that I don't mind games being proprietary -- they're a bit like movies or books in the way that it is the content, and not the code, that actually matters.

That said, there are obviously lots of reasons for wanting to use Wine.

Re:but...

[Dolda2000]

An emulator, by the very definition of the word, emulates something. Wine emulates the MS Windows API. Thus, Wine is an emulator.

Re:but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So riddle me this Batman, is GNU a Unix emulator?

I think we have Vista to think for this

[mlwmohawk]

The problem with wine has always been the moving target that is Windows. That's how Microsoft keeps itself relevant. Using its monopoly position to keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill.

With Vista so terrible and, really, only new machines going vista and old machines staying as they are on XP, the XP level of the Win32 API has remained fairly stable for a good number of years. In fact, it may be unlikely that Microsoft will ever be able to unify the user base on a new version of the API again.

(And yes I know that there are still users of 3.1, W95,W98,W98SE, etc. but these are static installations that typically don't buy new software.)

Wine, moving forward, has a very good chance of capturing a usable market because ISVs are reluctant to abandon XP in any meaningful way.

Re:Thank you, Wine developers!

[hab136]

You could have also used a virtual machine, such as VMWare ($$$) or MS Virtual PC (free). In a testing environment, these have advantages over Wine such as system snapshots.

Re:serious question

[Fnkmaster]

95% supported - is that sort of like 95% pregnant?

Re:but...

[Fieryphoenix]

No, you can't derive definitions due to linguistic relations between the words. Yes, emulators emulate, but that doesn't mean that if anything whatsoever is emulated, it is an emulator in the technical sense that is under discussion.

Re:but...

[mhall119]

You've already been corrected multiple times in this thread, so I won't repeat the same thing. Rather, I'll provide an analogy that may make it clearer:

AMD does not emulate x86, it implements it. Similarly, WINE does not emulate the Win32 API, it implements it.

Conversely, QEMU emulates x86, it does not implement it.

Re:but...

[TeknoHog]

An emulator, otoh, lets a piece of software think (if you'll excuse the anthropomorphism)that it is running on windows while it is using a different API.

Which is exactly what Wine does.

Re:but...

[eldepeche]

Yeah, and we all know there is never a difference between the plain-language and technical meanings of a word. Just because a hard drive "remembers" data does not mean we call it memory, no matter how many times my dad says otherwise.

Re:Wait, What?! - Those stats aren't accurate

[bug1]

"Still...it's hard for me to be enthusiastic when the only piece of software that I"

Maybe you could be enthusiastic for what it means to other people.