Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced

An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set): many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."

Re:What?

[Darkness404]

It isn't that slow when the target keeps moving. 17 years ago, we weren't even using NT, some of us were still using DOS as being "good enough" and the rest of us were using Windows 3.x, now those goals have changed and WINE has to run 32 and 64 bit software written for Vista and Windows 7. 15 years would be a long time for a "dead" platform like the Atari 2600 or the SNES. But Windows is changing and what was "good enough" one year now needs major work to keep up with the programs.

Re:The Wrong Way

[nschubach]

It's a chicken and egg scenario.

Re:The Wrong Way

[Ethanol-fueled]

More aggresively -- WINE is one of the best ways for Linux to embrace, extend, and extinguish -- beat Redmond at their own game.

In fact, WINE is great for running legacy, closed-source software whose development is long dead with no native build going to be made.

Which is funny because one of the traditional perceived strengths of Windows is its backwards compatibility.

Re:The Wrong Way

[Jahf]

Sadly, while isn't a fart in the wind like it was 17 years ago, Linux most definitely is not a major force in the desktop computing world. MOST of what people use Wine for is just that: desktop computing. Market share is a teensy blip for that type of Linux computing ... and the places where it IS much bigger tend to spend virtually nothing on commercial software.

All that forcing people to write natively to Linux instead of using Wine will do is starve those people of apps and slowly push them to Windows.

I'm in that boat. I spent nearly a decade doing technical marketing and sales engineer work for Linux products including desktop environments. Nowadays? I do that work for networking gadgets instead and have zero Linux systems active. I may have another one soon, but it will be in the form of a phone.

I'd LOVE it if Linux had made inroads, and I did my share on helping with that, but it didn't. And at some point you -do- need to find a system that will work in your corporate and social environments.

Re:What?

[DarkKnightRadick]

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Re:The Wrong Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because it was too good.

WINE applications are definitely second-class citizens on linux. Sure, it works, but it doesn't remove the incentive for a native-application.

(Look at Mac - where Classic worked for MacOS 9 under 10, but everyone knew it was definitely second-best; or now how Carbon was second-best compared to Cocca.)

But with OS/2, developers could release a windows version and say that's it, done.

Re:But Windows 7 Is So Schweet!

[Sir_Lewk]

Believe it or not, WINE isn't meant for people who are using Windows... It's great that Windows suits your purposes, I'm happy that you are happy but otherwise don't give a damn. However, it is naive (and terribly offtopic) to suggest that nobody needs to run Windows applications on non-Windows platforms anymore.

Re:The Wrong Way

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.

And IRIX and SVR4.

Re:"emulator"?

[bill_mcgonigle]

It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.

it's stateless?

Re:The Wrong Way

[jonwil]

The way things are going, Solaris will be dead soon too (especially if Oracle keeps doing what its been doing)

Re:The Wrong Way

[icebraining]

Wine was testes for virus compability not so long ago. Turns out they use obscure APIs that Wine doesn't support yet, so most of them don't run. Of course, as Wine gets better, more will.

I would just disable the filetype association of .exe files with Wine, and run the necessary apps with a menu entry like "wine app.exe", so any virus those employees downloaded would simply sit there.

Re:What?

[TheRaven64]

15 years got them the ability to run most apps that required Windows 2000, quite a few that required XP, as well as apps using the old Win16 APIs. How long did it take Microsoft to get to the same place?

Defined rules on MSDN

[tepples]

Software cannot be implemented without adhering to a set of defined rules.

There are two sets of defined rules. One of them is the MSDN documentation for the Windows platform. Another less defined set is that a specific suite of programs, which by 1.0 included Office 2007 viewers, has substantially the same behavior on Wine as on Windows.