Wine 1.4 Released 168
vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."
First Wine Post (Score:5, Funny)
Full bodied with a distinct Windowsy flavor.
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You mean it tastes like glass? But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!
That being said, anything that can keep me in FreeBSD more, and Windows 7 less, without losing the programs I like, is a good thing.
Re:First Wine Post (Score:4, Funny)
But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!
Wah, wah! Baby wants a Zima!
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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What's wrong with Win 7?
You have to click on something to scroll it, no always on top menu item (even though th OS supports it), no tabbed file browsing, window title text looks terrible, the list goes on. basically a whole host of minor annoyances that really add up
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get KatMouse - it fixes the scrolling issue :) awesome little tool (and no its not mine).
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I just need to put something out here:
I freaking hate breadcrumbs ... I enjoyed how the old Explorer used to automatically open the tree folders to the current folder (and now that's a half implemented option... and there are no more tree lines!) As a programmer, I find myself frequently in the depths of large trees of code and it's nice to be able to simply copy/paste between working branches and trunks for code when needed. Without the tree view auto-navigating and the lines it makes finding the approp
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This might be handy for any W7 users reading this.
- To get the current address on the breadcrumbs, you can right click on any crumb and choose copy address.
- If you click the icon left of the breadcrumbs ( or white space on the right ) it will reveal the folder path and highlight it ready for copying.
- There is a folder tree view in explorer if you expand the 'Computer' section in the left pane. To have it always expand to the folder being viewed: Tools, Folder Options, General Tab, Tick 'Automatically expa
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But if you want a particular folder name, it's much more involved than it used to be. Previously, just double clicking the folder name would select it. Now it changes to that folder.
Clicking on the icon or CTRL-L... both are an extra step in trying to reveal the real address so you can select part of it. I don't feel the breadcrumbs offer that much more usability to warrant the extra step.
The folder view doesn't have relationship lines so when you are in a deep nest of source files, it's hard to correlat
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Yeah, because registry tweaks are the first thing I want to do when sitting down at another computer to use it. And I'm sure the person's computer it is will enjoy it too.
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"registry" that makes passing tweaks between folks beyond simple and easy
Did I read that right? "Simple and Easy??? -- I mean you can completely ruin your machine if you screw up an registry entry and it's not exactly intuitive. Window advocates complain about the user-unfriendliness of config files in Linux but they are a dream compared to the Windows registry and are much better documented.
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Aw damn I was hoping to go back and play MW3 and i76 on my Win7 gaming PC. I have an old XP computer converted to a VM that I can run OpenGL games on.
If the problem with i76 is similar to the problem with WipeoutXL and Shipwreckers, it's tied to the CPU speed and the only thing that can help is a CPU slowdown utility.
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Re:First Wine Post (Score:5, Funny)
What's wrong with Win 7?
It can't run on Linux
Re:First Wine Post (Score:4, Funny)
EDIT: It can't run on *my* Linux. I'm still on a Pentium 4 :'(
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What's wrong with Win 7?
I could list a bunch of complaints, but I thought I'd answer you by telling you what my wife says about windows 7.
She's not a technical user, and she complains about how slow it is. Everything is slow. Linux took under a minute to start up on the same machine (to a usable gui), yet win7 takes over 2 minutes, probably more. Its probably an extra minute until you can actually click or do anything in the GUI.
I dont use windows much so I cant really say much more than that - other than its still a mess the way
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How old is the machine? I have a circa-vista Core2 Duo, and it loads up Windows 7 really fast (definitely faster than Linux did, when I was experimenting with it), and performs quite smoothly.
I haven't had to frequently reinstall windows since Windows 2000. What do you do to your boxes?
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I have a quad-core AMD machine, 4GB RAM, 2TB disk.
I dont know what it is except that its windows and over time it slows down. I haven't reinstalled it since about 12 months ago, and that wasn't for performance reasons.
I'm not sure what the problem is, and I really dont have enough patience with windows to bother finding out. Its just slow. Linux has always been faster in daily use in my experience, but then I use linux daily and I use windows for letting my kids watch DVDs occasionally (I dont have a tv, st
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o.O Core 2 Duo + 2GB mem + 320GB disk here...
Heh, that's my experience with a Mac, that's why I hackintoshed a computer - I don't pay the overhead, but I can familiarize myself with the OS.
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The window borders are too large, (from vista, but still in 7) the input field color cant be set different from the window background color. The window borders and buttons are ugly and distracting.
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Oh, and replacing text with buttons in the file browsing location bar is extremely irritating, I know it only takes half a second or so to get it to show text, but it's each time you access it, and that gets annoying quick.
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What's wrong with Win 7?
I think it has it's strengths. I have one laptop with it and one with Ubuntu. I noticed in your post that you only compared it to other Windows OS's and I think that when you are using other OS's, which also have their issues, that you'll see some of the limitations in the Windows world. The main thing I think is wrong with Windows in general and this includes Windows 7 is that it is sluggish compared to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, FreeBSD and so on. I used to dual-boot my Windows laptop and I always felt like some
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Direct X support, maybe not - but for 3D with OpenGL, with an nVidia card, FreeBSD does amazingly well (at least on par with XP ~2-3 years ago). Given that Linux support is usually better than FreeBSD support for 3D, I'd have to say, you might want to step away from the LSD.
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So fine, you go to XP for what's essentially a stable 98 with great memory management, and even later vid card support. Except XP has that 'phone home' install problem to combat piracy. It also gets in the way every time you upgrade the box. XP is dead; it's not an OS you can keep going forever on old hardware, unless you've got basically your first XP computer still, and it's already got awesome specs, and it is immortal. XP was the first "subscription" Windows, and it's over.
Crack + Autopatcher, and ideally you should keep these old computers airgapped.
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An impertinent little release, with a bold, fruity taste.
How to tell if vintages are good. (Score:2)
How to tell if WINE vintages are good:
The weather for that year: were the programmers working in enough darkness? Did they get too much sunlight?
Soil: Did the program get developed on a recent Linux distro?
Food: Did the programmers get enough coffee, colas, pizza and beer? VERY IMPORTANT.
If the programmers were put on a strict vegan diet while working in a tropical environment and spending their free time on the beach, well you might as well just have a Windows machine.
Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 - http://www.winehq.org/download/debian [winehq.org]
Still, thank you all for the fantastic project called Wine!
Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 (Score:5, Informative)
Debian hasn't packaged 1.2 yet, these are third-party packages.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=585409 [debian.org]
Apparently one of the issues why the newer versions can't be packaged is that the maintainer wants to package and upload all versions between the last one and 1.4 in order. Since nobody has the time to do so, there isn't any progress towards packaging the newer ones.
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This is why I linked to Kai's page, as he is the one who has been the reliable source for Wine.
Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)
I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.
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Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)
I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.
Oddly enough "needing things to work" is why I compile something from source on an almost daily basis... If you are going to be working anywhere even within walking distance of the bleeding edge you will be needing (and possibly developing) the latest tools and drivers. You will not find them in the "stable" binary repository.
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I consider Arch to be fairly bleeding edge, at least more so than most other distributions. I don't have to build much unless I want something off of AUR. Even then it's really easy to build that stuff (often very quick too). Someone else has worked out all the details and you just untar, type makepkg, wait a minute or two and be done.
It's close enough to the edge but not so close you risk falling. You can get even closer for the things that really interest you but stay reasonably stable but fresh for
the last rc version was rc6. (Score:2)
the last rc version was 1.4-rc6 before this 1.4
Blast from the past (Score:5, Interesting)
It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.
Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blast from the past (Score:5, Informative)
Those need a Windows license. Wine doesn't.
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I believe you mean "those need a Windows OS to be installed and maintained". No virtual Windows machine I've ever seen hasn't had the gentle attention of an activator. Or been installed from a preactivated all-versions torrent.
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Slightly off topic, but I wonder why react OS doesn't switch to using kde as a window manager. you would think that would free them up from having to do a lot of the crap that they spend their time on. But maybe i'm wrong.
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It could, using the alternative windowing subsystem [reactos.org] (X11). And in fact that branch is used to compare Wine vs. ReactOS behavior in certain cases.
Accoding to http://windows.kde.org/ [kde.org] the Windows port of KDE is not functional - but a Windows port would mean that all of the underlying API calls implemented by ReactOS have to be implemented and correct, or the port won't run anyway.
Finally, the point of ReactOS is that Windows programs should run on it. There is no reason to introduce KDE, when you have to wri
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Finally, the point of ReactOS is that Windows programs should run on it.
Yes, and unless I'm mistaken KDE on windows would run windows apps as well.
There is no reason to introduce KDE
THe reason, as I mentioned above would be to save them time from having to write a menu system and taskbar and ect. assuming KDE on windows was working well enough.
when you have to write things like explorer.exe and the whole shell that Windows programs expect to have. The "crap that they spend their time on" is making a binary-compatible Windows OS.
Yes, they'll have to make stuff work. Like explorer.exe. BUt they would save themselves much time.
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You are completely wrong.
Code sharing (Score:5, Informative)
The ReactOS and the Wine project share a lot of code [reactos.org] (most of the userspace libraries. Consider ReactOS as a Wine userland + WinNT-like kernel). So therefore, the day ReactOS is actually a complete OS that can run 100% of windows software, is also the day that Wine can run all the Windows software too.
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how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?
That's a little like asking how the Toyota Prius stacks up against a Boeing 727. While technically both are able to get you from Boston to New York, they have completely different use cases.
Virtual machine servers are intended to run an entire alternate operating system (under which you can run whatever applications you want). Wine, on the other hand, is intended to allow you to run Windows programs *without having Windows at all*.
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Remember also that there are two parts to Wine: there's the runtime environment (take a compiled PE file and run it on another architecture) that most people think of, but the more interesting part is the libraries: you can take a piece of source code written for Windows 7 and compile it against the Wine libs to run on pretty much any other architecture.
That said, my main use for Wine has been to create portable OS X bundles of Windows apps, with all the config files, etc. being inside the application bundl
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It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.
Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?
Depends. If you need something that "just works" most of the time, you're probably going to want to do a virtual machine. The problems though can be extensive, namely in terms of performance. Games, for example, typically run like boiled crap in a VM. However, some stuff works okay that way, even if it's a rather ham-fisted way to do it (why virtualize an entire machine if all I need is Outlook?).
Wine still has its quriks but the performance it gives is substantially better (quick bench: World of Warcr
Re:Blast from the past (Score:5, Interesting)
Same here. When I used Linux regularly I eventually switched to VMWare for running Windows, as Wine didn't really cut it (probably talking about ten years ago, though...).
Eventually I realised that I was spending 90% of my time using either a web browser or a Windows applications (Photoshop and Lightroom) and I might as well run Windows on the bare metal. With tools like Cygwin and LAMP I have most of what I'd miss from Linux, so I guess I've done it the other way round; made Windows more like Linux rather than Linux more like Windows.
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Comparing wine to a full system emulator is your first mistake. It's more akin to running things in a chroot then an emulator. Performance wise it's great as long as the program you are using works perfectly.
I'm a super admin very a couple of dozen games on the appdb with ratings between garbage and platinum and the truth is that nowadays I'm disappointed where wine doesn't run something out the box. It's older games that it struggles with, for instance RAGE worked out the box for me yet something like Star
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I hear you. I would so love if Wine could run Rogue Squadron... But even on Windows, that game was a little too peculiar.
Haven't tried running it in years, now.
One really pleasant surprise was being invited to a LAN party and installing Counterstrike. Its performance was flawless.
Cheers to the Wine developers!
Great, sometimes (Score:5, Informative)
When Wine works well, it is far superior to running the app in a VM, for a number of reasons
- Performance - When an app runs well under Wine, it runs as fast as it does under Windows on the same machine, or sometimes it runs even faster. Running under a VM is never as fast as running native on the same hardware.
- Desktop integration - When an app is installed under Wine, it automatically integrates with your GNOME/KDE desktop... the application is available in the menu, same window manager, etc. Yes there are solutions for this under VMs like VMWare Fusion, but it is not as clean and frankly usually is buggy as all get out.
When an app runs in Wine well, I prefer to run it that way over a VM. VMs are much better though to be sure the app is running the exact way it was meant to run.
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All my friends that play SC2 run Windows and play it at the lowest settings anyway. For a twitch game like that where half a second miss-click costs you the game (According to them anyway), you just can't take any chances of local lag.
Thus if the only difference is the graphical settings, WINE is just as good as Windows platform.
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VirtualBox has a 'seemless mode' for gnome/kde integration.
The only performance cost I've hit with VMs is if you don't have the ram, there is no real CPU performance hit.
I love win when it works, but that usually requires you to run it against software made for win 2000/XP unless it is popular enough for people to get fixes submitted upsteam (WoW)
Re:Blast from the past (Score:4, Interesting)
you get working 3D acceleration. never got that to run under Virtualbox even though you only have to check a box, and somehow other people have it working. your I/O is not slow and CPU hungry it seems. but compatibility is still hit or miss - I'm talking about games mainly. my wine 1.3.28 just crapped at running return to castle wolfenstein and even with warcraft III I have stuttering sound. but I should update my 1.3 via ppa.
my great plan is to switch to IOMMU virtualisation, running presumably Xen. a physical graphics card will be passed-thru to a windows gaming-only VM. but I need new hardware (an asrock mobo with 970 chipset, I will go from 2GB ddr2 to 8GB ddr3). I also fear that it may be a pain in the ass and ill supported, and needing a VGA switch or a KVM.
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There are native Linux binaries for RtCW. You don't have to run that one in Wine.
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The Xen + IOMMU setup is what I use and it works great once you get it setup. Hardware selection is the key to making it less painful to setup. Specifically, if you try to use an nVidia card as the passthrough card, you are in for a world of pain but, an ATI 6800 series is essentially an out of the box experience once you configure the bootloader to block the device from dom0. You'll also need to be careful which distro you use. The Debian flavor of distros do an awesome job of setting up grub to do the
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thanks a lot!, it's hard to get accounts on this setup, besides a few youtube videos.
Yes I was planning an ATI card for windows (first a cheap one then maybe a radeon 7770), and my 8400GS for linux. dedicate a USB controller, easy enough (I can even use an old USB 1 card). yes, passing through random devices looks fun. you can use a both on-board and discrete sound cards, etc. I will have to get a damn USB to PS/2 adapter (one that works) and the USB KVM is another expense but it's not too bad.
Do you run th
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No contest. If it works in Wine, it's far nicer to use under Wine. VMs are a lot more compatible, because they run the entire OS, but it doesn't integrate as nicely as Wine does. When you run a program with Wine, you're running a native program just using winelib instead of win32.
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Most of the things you'd want Windows for (DirectX games) don't work any better in a VM than in Wine anyway (in fact a lot of code has been shared back and forth between Wine and VirtualBox), so VMs rarely have an advantage in terms of app compatibility.
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It's not a virtual machine, it's a reimplementation of the windows API.
That aside, I play last-gen games (like the Mass Effect 3 Demo) with great performance. That's imposible inside any VM.
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I can run Photoshop CS4 in wine with no major issues. I had been using Virtuabox before that, and I found the performance to be better with wine. (This was with an Athlon XP 1.4 GHz + 1256 megs of ram with Linux Mint)
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Its approximately infinitely better if you want to use software designed for Windows without actually purchasing or pirating Windows.
On the other hand, its worse than Windows-in-a-VM if you want to test how something runs under Windows.
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VMware is big and bulky, it runs the entire machine inside an emulator. You install Windows inside the emulator. You can use VMware on machines with different architectures. Wine does not work that way, it uses the native processor and it emulates Windows through libraries and DLLs. So it's a lot less overhead. Ie, you'd be very hard pressed to get good game performance out of VMware but people do use Wine for games a lot.
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How does it compare to vmware? Huh? Those are different tools to solve different problems and work differently.
Why not compare iPads to cars too?
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VMWare, Virtual box and other virtual machines are well.. virtual machines, they require running an operating system on top of an operating system to run your windows app. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) project doesn't do this.
WINE provides a set of APIs which translates windows API calls to BSD and Linux ones. For example, your windows application might call an api to open a directx window where as in wine it will have the same API name and inside that function call open an openGL window.
Doing this doesn't
Re:Blast from the past (Score:4, Informative)
VirtualBox and VMware emulators are a type called pass-through emulation, which actually only emulates a small amount of functionality of the system (mainly drivers) and the rest is all native, so the performance hit is generally trivial. At most you should see about a 20% hit in CPU here (as long as you aren't memory bound - WINE shouldn't chew up as much memory as a VM, generally). If the GPU is hardware accelerated and properly passed through, there should be almost no hit unless the drivers for that platform are particularly bad.
WINE is a native implementation of the Windows APIs, so if an API isn't implemented, it crashes and burns. Also it actually has the same problem as VMs in regards to devices - they need to be implemented or they won't work and in the case of WINE, very few are. OTOH, WINE can use all graphics memory if used with DX or OpenGL and most VMs share an amount of it (VirtualBox I think is up to 256M now, but my card has 1GB). Likewise emulators usually are assigned some of your CPUs and WINE can use all of them.
When I have VirtualBox properly set up, I get two frames less in Linux running in the emulator than I did in native Windows, so I suspect your VM isn't running with hardware accelerated drivers. With VirtualBox you also need to turn off the native mouse pointer to use OpenGL with hardware acceleration or you spin like crazy (or it will start driving for you in 2D), so if you have the native pointer on and aren't spinning, you aren't in native OpenGL, which requires installing the VirtualBox extensions and the native hardware driver. If your hardware acceleration was properly set up, how much video memory did the OpenGL program consume?
Hitler's reaction to Wine (Score:2)
Der Führer has a love/hate relationship with it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcvkbrwDuaY [youtube.com]
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adolf@reichsbox:~$: mv .wine wine_bak; sudo apt-get remove --purge wine; sudo apt-get install wine
Or alternatively "cp -pR .wine wine_bak" before screwing around with winetricks.
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I just run every app in its own separate bottle. I have this alias in my .bashrc:
alias bottle='export WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=`pwd` && winecfg'
I open a terminal, CD in the directory that I want my windows program to go into and then type 'bottle'. It opens the winecfg panel and I make any adjustments needed. Then I run the installer from that terminal. Everything else is automagic. Program shortcuts are created with the appropriate env WINEPREFIX="blahblah" and work perfectly. As long as you
What I want to know (Score:2)
Which apps? (Score:4, Interesting)
Better question I can think of - which Windows apps does one want to run under Linux/BSD? Office? IE? Chrysis? I checked out 2 versions of Minesweeper - one under Wine, and one native in Linux. Preferred the native one. Of course, if I prefer Office 2003 to Calligra Suite (I still find Office 2007 a pain to work w/), I might prefer Wine. Maybe QuickBooks could use Wine? That's one of the few apps I can think of that doesn't have a good replacement in Linux.
But honestly, I think a lot of apps could use a WABI like approach. In the past, they suffered, but the main reason for that was that WABI was about running Wintel binaries on RISC based Unixstations, such as Suns, HP-9000s, RS/6000 workstations and so on. But heck, NT on RISC itself couldn't run Wintel binaries, so it's no surprise that these platforms did worse. But w/ any Intel based Unix - be it Linux, BSD or whatever, that should not be an issue. If I'm working in an X based desktop, such as KDE or GNOME or something similar, I don't expect my applications to look like Windows to the point that even the Window menus and everything have to be identical: a KDE or GNOME look & feel is okay.
I think a better goal would be that instead of targetting Office 2010, which like 2007 is a new UI - ribbons & everything, make the native Linux Offices - LibreOffice, Calligra Suite, et al as similar to Office 2003 as possible, and promote that to users. I had been a long time Office 2003 user, and I find 2007 tough to navigate, despite being so fluent w/ its predecessor. And I'm not a typical lay user. So if the new Office suites were to target 2003 and win over their users, a lot would have been achieved. Similarly, use Wine for things like QuickBooks, while in the meantime, hopefully, add something in the KDE Office apps suite to work w/ it, and hopefully make some arrangements w/ banks to support it.
I have no suggestions about the games. Only thing I think would be good - something like Windows Movie Maker - dunno whether OpenShot video editor fits the bill. Cinerella and Avidemux are way too complicated.
I do hope that ReactOS matures soon, so that by the time MS has cleaned up its act on Windows 8, ReactOS is a good enough replacement for both XP and 7.
Re:Which apps? (Score:4, Informative)
The following are the apps that I run under Wine (just to give you an idea):
- World of Warcraft
- Audible
- Goldwave Pro (to un-DRM the Audible files)
My wife also uses some website's proprietary software to assemble photo albums, which are then uploaded, printed, bound, and shipped to her.
Civ (Score:2)
netflix (Score:2)
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Internet Exploder (Score:2)
About the only reason I would want to run WINE is to run [shutter] Internet Explorer so I can access some damn [private/business] web sites that STILL don't support anything else.
And yet WINE *STILL* cannot run Internet Explorer 7+ worth a damn (last ratings from 1.4.X)! Wouldn't one think that would be high on the list?
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=25 [winehq.org] (IE9 = garbage, IE 8 = bronze, IE 7 = bronze/garbage)
Since it is not tested by anyone under 1.4 yet, I guess I shoul
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>"worth a damn (last ratings from 1.4.X)!"
Sorry, that is a typo and should read:
"worth a damn (last ratings from 1.3.X)!"
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It has never been easy to run any version of IE under any version of WINE. The best we had it was an old project called "IES4Linux", but that was for IE 6, and didn't work all that well, and is now dead :(
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page [tatanka.com.br]
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Wine is $200 cheaper (Score:5, Informative)
With fast machines, loads of ram and virtual machines I am not sure what the point of wine is anymore.
You still to buy a $200 copy of retail Windows for the Mac or home-built desktop PC on which you run Windows inside a virtual machine. Xubuntu + Wine is cheaper than Windows, and Mac OS X + Wine is cheaper than Mac OS X + Windows.
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For LAN parties, I have a PXE server with various games built in that run via wine (also a component which manages which serial keys are in-use at a given time).
There were some initial wrangles getting the Nvidia/ATI blobs to install-on-demand, but with that running it's quite nice. I wouldn't be able to do quite the same thing with VirtualBox/VMware, not to mention the network overhead of loading a full VM image (each app has its own wine directory, so only the necessary files for that app are needed, plus
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Re:Wine is $200 cheaper (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...
I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.
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While I agree that whenever possible something like Wine is preferable to running Windows in a VM. I would like to point out that this stuff about VM's not being useable for gaming is pretty out-of-date. I've run many recent releases, including SW:TOR in a VM on my year old laptop just fine. At playable frame rates. WoW I don't bother with since it has a native Mac client, but there is really nothing stopping someone these days.
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and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows
I assure you, you're not in the majority there. For a little while, performance was pretty decent, but on my fairly new computer with top-of-the-line video card currently, performance drops down to almost-unbearable (less than 10-fps) in raid finder raids unless I turn every single video setting down to its minimum. This was also the case in Burning Crusade, but the game was quite playable in large groups in Wrath and I thought Cata as well.
My frustration with WoW under Wine is that OpenGL is treated as "go
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Nope, Desktop, it was a few months old at the time, which was probably around two years ago.
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It's usefull because I don't have to buy windows (simply because I don't want to), and because I have far better integration.
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Unless you're exclusively playing Solitaire, you're probably not going to be able to play most games in a virtual machine, at least on a Linux host. I have a Windows XP VM that I run in both VirtualBox and VMware, and I've had very limited success playing games in either. VirtualBox can barely handle 3D graphics at all (though its support has improved significantly in the last couple of years), and VMware's acceleration, while significantly more stable, is awfully slow.
Unless the situation is for some reas
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It will absolutely make that possible. In fact, I suspect that's why CodeWeavers spent the development effort on the DIB engine. This enables the Wine release to happen now, and then even if a Quartz driver is developed, it'll still only be in the development branch for quite some time before it's released, or they can choose to develop that as a proprietary piece on their own.