Wine 6.0 Released (windowscentral.com) 100
Wine 6.0 has been released today and contains over 8,300 changes, according to its full release notes. Windows Central reports: The new release of version 6.0 has thousands of changes, but Wine's website highlights some of the biggest improvements: Core modules in PE format; Vulkan backend for WineD3D; DirectShow and Media Foundation support; and Text console redesign. The full release notes for Wine 6.0 explain that the core DLLs, which include NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, and USER32 are now built in the Portable Executable (PE) format. As a result, people should see improvements for certain copy protection schemes.
The update also includes a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with the PE module. This change makes it so systems can call Unix libraries from PE when trying to perform a function that can't be handled by Win32 APIs. Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.
The update also includes a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with the PE module. This change makes it so systems can call Unix libraries from PE when trying to perform a function that can't be handled by Win32 APIs. Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.
Still. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Keep explaining till they laugh
— Colin Mochrie, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"
Re:Still. (Score:4, Insightful)
And still it can't emulate Windows.
I think it does a great job in "emulating" (I know Wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") Windows for those purposes I use it. It is certainly a useful program and it gets just better with each release.
I have used it for sending stuff to legacy graph calculators, for timegraphing my mechanical watches and many other things. For those special corner cases where you might not find *NIX program Wine is great. I am not a gamer so I am not able to say much about how well it works with them, but I have tried AoE I, AoE II (the legacy AoC version) and Operation Flashpoint and all of them are working great too.
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I'm confused. You imply that you found a windows application that actually ran under Wine? After years of trying dozens upon dozens of applications, and never once having one actually run, I completely gave up on Wine.
Re: Still. (Score:2)
You're either extremely unlucky or you haven't tried much if at all. Wine had limits but plenty of applications run really well under it. Winehq's database has lots of platinum for a reason.
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WineHQ's database is full of pointless and useless applications. I have no need to run applications that have equal or better equivalents under Linux. The only applications I ever need to run are things which have no Linux equivalent at all. These are often things such as programs to interact with proprietary hardware, or custom banking applications, etc. None of these ever work.
It's all neat that you can get some obscure version of Word working, but there's no point to that when there are so many office su
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WINE runs an awful lot of games via the Proton fork, which is useful because virtually no mainstream games have Linux ports or equivalents.
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I've had very inconsistent results with WINE. It seems like that for a lot of people it's all or nothing- either it works or it doesn't.
I'm guessing it's a fundamental config difference way down deep in the innards of the OS but honestly I have no idea. I just know that for a lot of people it doesn't seem to work while other people report plenty of success.
I've been mostly in the "doesn't work for me" category, so much so that for me it was easier to install VirtualBox to run whatever it was I needed.
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Yes, it replaces it. And it is so much better for it.
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Unless you want to run software I guess...
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Exactly this. I've never found a windows application I need to run, that would actually run under wine.
To be clear, most windows programs I have no need to run as there are perfectly fine linux equivalents available. The only time I ever need to run a windows program is if it's some proprietary thing, usually to update firmware of some IOT device, or interface with some obscure piece of hardware. I have never found a single one of those that runs under wine. I gave up and don't even try anymore.
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One program: Deneba/ACD/now CanvasGFX Canvas. Does-everything drawing program that's competitive on a basic level with (in the top version) all of: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, basic CADD, and ESRI GIS, all in one user interface with any type of object usable and editable on any layer. Yes, all of those functions are available in other software, but usually one at a time not integrated. The UI has survived many years of Windows with a good bit of its original Mac orientation intact, the good parts that
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I'm surprised ESRI GIS works on Wine, given it doesn't really work on Windows...
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Guess again.
Wasted effort (Score:1, Insightful)
About a year or so ago I tried to run Password Safe in Wine, but even this relatively simple program would stumble and crash.
Re:Wasted effort (Score:4, Interesting)
But think of the millions of man hours that have been poured into Wine, and could have been spent in porting just 1% of the "killer apps" for Windows.
If all the effort put into Wine went into Photoshop, World and Excel, that would have been something that was game changing.
Re:Wasted effort (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think WINE is quite the same use case but there are similarities. If a game can be made to run through WINE then why would a company ever contemplate producing a Linux port?
But on the flip side, Microsoft are kind of doing it to themselves with Linux. Windows is now an extremely viable development platform for Linux software. WSL works great and you can fire up native editors like VS Code to develop & debug it. That might snag Microsoft a few extra desktop licences but I think it completely blows any plans they have for embedding / internet of things and possibly for a lot of server development too..
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In the OS/2 days, there wasn't certainty whether this obviously successful, but still new little company Microsoft or IBM would naturally win this one, so without compatibility it might have been that more app vendors hopped on OS/2 train, or hedged their bets by doing both. Though I don't know how much of their challenge was due to that versus an uphill battle where IBM clones would rather IBM not control the OS since they were also a competitor, and thus would exert their influence to make Microsoft win.
I
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I was part of an OS/2 IBM employee user group, that existed well into Warp 4+ Merlin (early 2000's, Windows NT 4) -- We approached IBM wanting to buy OS/2 with an offer of close to US $1,250,000. They countered with an offer of right around $850,000,000 and obviously that wasn't happening for us.
There's a company that I guess has assumed "OS/2" development. I don't think they paid 850 million, and I don't think they cared as much about this OS as we did, or even
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I sat at Lou Girstner's desk, twice, with an intention to grapple OS/2 away from IBM, along with two other people (one guy went onto doing something related to Netscape, and the other something to deal with 3D shooters...). I was 22 years old, and it's something that obviously never happened. At least he was a mensch and was willing to entertain our fantasies....).
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OS/2 was encumbered with a lot licensed IP, which probably meant the legal department would have seizures when management pondered selling it. In their minds, it was largely a dead product, save for a fairly narrow niche of instant teller banking machines. Better to just license it than go through the hell (and even possible litigation) of an outright sale. they had already written off by 2000 and absorbed the losses from the last big push in the mid-90s to get into the PC market place with it. As I recall,
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I still find WSL a pain in the ass, things work and then don't work, particularly if you're trying to run a LAMP stack or something similar on WSL. Honestly, I moved my home development platform to a Raspberry PI 4 server, for my test beds. It's Linux in the full sense of the word, is pretty darned stable, and takes up so little space that it does fine for hosting development sites. I get no quirkiness. I know WSL has its fans, but however close to Linux it is, it just isn't Linux enough, or has too many bu
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I gather that WSL2 fares better than WSL1 did, though it's so much more straightforward to just run Linux to me.
However I have had more than a few coworkers that were long-time Linux people saying 'WSL is actually good enough for me'.
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WSL2 certainly performs better than WSL, because, as I gather, it is virtualized. But I've still had persistent problems running daemons or having the port forwarding work consistently so that I can access daemons like Apache. I can figure out how to make WSL and WSL2 work properly, or I can just run a Linux machine which has no layers sitting on top of it, and that's the route I've taken. As it is, everything I do ends up on production Linux servers, so having a small inexpensive environment that pretty mu
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I don't think from a long term strategy perspective Microsoft has much interest in desktop Windows. I don't even think they care all that much about Windows Server; other than perhaps as an internal project they use to support Azure; but unlike desktop Windows I think they are probably quite happy to secondarily market it enterprises and folks who have specific reasons to not go cloud. Windows Server usually represents some kind of continuing revenue through licensing programs and support. I think they most
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I would say they do care about desktop still, both as a significant revenue stream for devices moved and also 'owning' a key platform that users interact with, to 'steer' them toward MS desired outcomes (e.g. steering developers toward .Net and Azure even as they do things in Linux). WSL conspicuously is good enough for CLI use and with some effort, 'locally remote' X, with a roadmap to perhaps one day be more seamlessly 'locally remote RDP'. This aligns with 'linux user developing server applications', but
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IOW Microsoft == IBM.
Services are the big deal, because they produce recurring income without having to sell new product upgrades periodically. In that regard, MS seems to be doing better than IBM, based on the far greater footprint of Azure vs IBM Cloud; though only MS seems (from very far outside of the game) even remotely competitive with AWS and Google.
Rent-seeking is where it is.
The PC market (defined as PERSONAL computing using your own devices and software you (ideally) wrote, or have a perpetual lic
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Edit:: most editions of Windows will become (it's close now) an embedded smart terminal support platform. If Edge were to be integrated with Windows the way they tried to do IE, then perhaps from a marketing standpoint Windows would be the smart terminal. Level of remote manageability would vary, as it does now, with the lowest and highest editions almost completely remotely managed (Home = S, Enterprise). "Professional" or small-business-targeted editions may still allow some local management and personal
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Edit2: actually, somewhere in recent updates, possibly 20H2, Win10 Home became S when the application preference became, by default, Store apps only. If you find the setting (it's not hidden TOO well, though you need to know to look in the Apps settings), you get the default, load other apps but warn, load other apps but offer Store alternative, and just load other apps. Pro doesn't seem to have acquired this "feature" in the Apps settings (yet). Home, though, has gone from default suggest to lockdown unles
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Price did that more than IBM (Score:2)
If you're selling a GUI that you know your users are going to shut down 80%-90% of the time you don't want to spend extra on the ones that work. Instead you buy Windows. Sure it crashes all the time and is dog slow and feels more like a toy running on a C64 (ok, let's be honest, more like a VIC-20) but you don't care. Yo
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WSL is really a way for Microsoft to sell you Azure.
They see the writing on the wall - Windows licenses are still a money maker now, as are Office licenses.
However, Microsoft has seen an increase in revenue from cloud - Office 365, Azure, etc.
It's why Microsoft has made Linux a first class citizen on Azure - lots of people demanded it, Microsoft saw the money and made it so. WSL evolved out of that - people are doing Linux on Azure, why not let them do it from Windows as well. The people using it will likel
Re:Wasted effort (Score:4, Interesting)
Where can the Wine team download the source code for Photoshop, Word end Excel?
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"This type of compatibility layer is understood to have been what tanked OS/2 as a Windows replacement."
That "understanding" is naive and lacks an appreciation for the historical timeline.
OS/2 was not a Windows replacement. Microsoft didn't consider it that, IBM didn't consider it that. At the time of OS/2's development, Windows wasn't the primary platform for PCs and users/developers were advised to use Windows as stepping stone to OS/2. At that time, there was no Win32.
Microsoft developed Win32 along s
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To some extent the fault was purism on IBM's part. MS was willing to make the massive 16/32 bit kludge that was Chicago/Windows 95. Sure, it implemented most of the Win32 API, but it was a pretty big mess, right down to TCP/IP support, which as I understand it, was largely just the Windows 3.11 socket implementation shunted into Windows 95. MS also did a masterful job of marketing Chicago before they even had an actual useable operating system, with friendly magazine publishers happily publishing mockups of
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The place I do a little consulting for, in their company computer, only got to where I don't need IE any more late last year. Their timekeeping and expenses system required IE to start. It was finally upgraded over Christmas to where it'll start from ChrEdge. So IE is now gone from the computer (removed when, also near the end of the year, Win10 Enterprise on the clients was upgraded from 1709 to 1903. Corporate...
You'd need to get Microsoft and Adobe (Score:2)
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If all the effort put into Wine went into Photoshop, World and Excel, that would have been something that was game changing.
All that effort did go into a replacement for those. Libre Office is a perfectly functional word replacement. GIMP on the other hand has major issues as a Photoshop replacement with focus on functionality for professionals utterly missing and a UI that is so abnormal in the industry that people who have used a myriad of other tools will be utterly lost when they first come across GIMP.
The thing is what is missing in these tools is not something more programming hours could fix. Throwing more developers at G
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I have used Libreoffice at home for many years; no actual need for Word, because LO is compatible enough. You're correct about work, though: there is for practical purposes no alternative to MS Office (now O365, renting space and software from MS).
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This type of compatibility layer is understood to have been what tanked OS/2 as a Windows replacement. I don't think that's something Linux has to be concerned about at this point.
But think of the millions of man hours that have been poured into Wine, and could have been spent in porting just 1% of the "killer apps" for Windows.
If all the effort put into Wine went into Photoshop, World and Excel, that would have been something that was game changing.
I feel like you greatly over-estimate the number of hours of development which has been put into Wine. Any of the apps you list (assume you meant "Word") probably have three or four orders of magnitude more hours of development time in them. I'm not saying they were quality development hours on useful features, but so it goes.
Heck, there's a good chance that LibreOffice and GIMP have more development hours in them than Wine.
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You are assuming that if someone can program one type of app, they can program any.
Also, that they have the same intertest with their free time as you have for their free time.
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OS/2 tanked for 2 reasons:
1. IBM put most of its efforts into making the system very well engineered but its user interface was obviously also done by engineers - especially the icons. MS put most of its effort into the user interface, hired professional artists to do the artwork (especially icons) and hoped (successfully) that users would live with crashes if it was pretty enough.
2. IBM made the compilers, DDK, SDK and other tools hard to get and very expensive. MS would push a bag of free tools into the h
Re:Wasted effort (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are wrong - Password Safe has a gold / platinbum rating according top
https://appdb.winehq.org/appvi... [winehq.org]
Maybe you made a mistake?
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The fact that the screenshot for Password Safe is actually a screenshot of the game realMYST also doesn't lend much confidence.
Re: Wasted effort (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of stuff in the db has a great rating, but does not work AT ALL when I try it, even with the same wine version they used.
Wine is way better than nothing but it is not at all as good as the app db makes it look.
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Luckily for me they also had a Linux version in beta, which worked flawlessly.
The effort could've been better spent developing alternative applications, is my view.
Re:Wasted effort (Score:4, Interesting)
The effort could've been better spent developing alternative applications, is my view.
The same people working on Wine might not be good application developers for any of a variety of reasons, including lack of interest.
The body of existing Windows software is highly useful, and being able to run it on Linux has made Linux viable for a number of users.
The real problem with Wine is that it can never achieve full compatibility with modern windows because it is a moving target. But at least it can achieve ever-improving compatibility, which is a lot better than nothing.
I'd rather have Linux-native versions of applications than Wine, but I'd rather have Wine than nothing.
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Wine can be awesome when it works. I remember getting it to run some stuff back in the 90s but the UI was usually fouled up.
I moved to VMware to ensure compatibility but it was usually slow.
Eventually, I sold out and run Windows but live in a cygwin shell 95% of the time.
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You should look into WSL on Windows. It's officially supported (you can install regular Linux distros from the Windows store) and runs actual Linux binaries directly without needing to recompile anything like Cygwin.
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in a similar vein
try to find a music player for linux that is half as functional as winamp.
kubuntu comes with a kde app, which is absolute garbage
also, what's with the stupid fucking names? "krita" "kate" "kretin"
what was wrong with KdeVectorGraphicsEditor? KdeTextEditor?
Re: Wasted effort (Score:2)
Try qmmp. It even supports your old winamp sounds I'm sure you still have stashed somewhere in your drive.
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I'm still using clementine, it has all the features I need / look for in a music player and then some.
https://www.clementine-player.... [clementine-player.org]
All the best,
Uwe
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They don't have to chase a moving target. They could, for a particular version of Wine, lock into a certain version of Windows. Like say at first Windows XP. They should try to get to 99% compatibility with XP while ignoring Vista or Windows 7 etc. Once 99% compatibility with Windows XP is achieved, then aim for Windows 7. Followed by 10, etc.
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They don't have to chase a moving target.
I'm quite certain that they do have to chase a moving target to keep people interested.
They could, for a particular version of Wine, lock into a certain version of Windows. Like say at first Windows XP.
The number of people interested in an OS that is 100% compatible with Windows XP will always shrink. People with an interest in an OS with 100% compatibility with the current Windows OS will always grow. People with familiarity with the current Windows OS will always be more than that of some fixed target dead Windows OS.
I expect that there will be people within the WINE developer community interested in XP compatibilit
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Keepass is now available in a native Linux version, that's usually at the same or the immediately previous version as Windows. Has been ported to Mono, I understand. One game I use (Open Rails) is also in the (apparently somewhat painful) process of porting to Mono; experimental versions exist and work, even in Linux, but parity with the original .Net version and comparable stability isn't quite there yet.
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I mean, finding one example like that isn't reflective of the whole project. People run fairly complex video games regularly under Wine.
Now, granted, I personally don't use it because I just have a Windows machine and a Linux machine (and technically a seldom used Mac) on a KVM switch and just use whatever machine I want to at the time, but still Wine will let you run a good deal of programs if you want.
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I considered switching over to Wine several years ago but the database made me change my mind real fast.
"Works great, except it crashes if you move left and the sound doesn't work and it will crash the first 5 times you start it up."
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I'm sure they're all great programmers but honestly it spent fifteen years in beta. FIFTEEN YEARS. Entire operating systems are built and go through several transformational changes in fifteen years. Huge, complicated software packages typically go from ideas in someone's head to mature, dominant technologies in fifteen years.
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They're probably waiting for MS to abandon the NT kernel, and then take over funding of Wine to implement Windows system calls and libraries...
Not going to say it will happen, but if MS were to go that route, Wine would be a pretty good start to getting Windows apps running on Linux.
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Far more likely would be Microsoft putting the real Windows kernel and core libraries into a minimal containerized virtual machine to handle Windows binaries... which is exactly how Windows currently handles Linux apps. Why bother faffing about with re-implementing the kernel as a compatibility layer when they can just use the real thing and spend their effort on interfacing it seamlessly?
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So? How long has your Windows API re-implementation been available as feature complete?
It ran just fine in beta as well. The only reason it was labeled beta was because the target functionality is vast, and they didn't feel like labeling it anything but beta for that long. It was still stable, and ran major applications just fine.
Seriously, what kind of complaint is this?
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FIFTEEN YEARS
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And the result is a very thin layer which runs Windows applications incredibly efficiently. On my Linux-converted Chromebook with 2GB of RAM I can easily run the Windows applications I need with capacity to spare, and that spec machine would not even boot Windows 10.
But this thin layer is a re-implementation of something that Microsoft spent over twenty years developing. And since the specification kept growing over those twenty years - and is still growing - technically, Wine will always be in beta. It rea
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FIF. TEEN. YEARS.
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Should have been twenty, if you ask me. It should still be in beta. When the scope grows faster than the application, that's how it is.
I disagree. (Score:5, Interesting)
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As a casual gamer, Stadia has completely replaced my need for Wine.
Sure, the selection is limited, but there's enough.
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Wine has in over 20 years of development failed to make an implementation that can emulate even basic Windows functionality.
^^^THIS.
If Wine was so wonderful we'd probably see it used a lot more. Moving to Linux would be a lot less scary for people if they could take their "must have" applications with them, but as the parent pointed out, it's so hit or miss that you may as well run VirtualBox.
VirtualBox works for just about everything I've tried with a few exceptions (stuff that needed Direct Video access or 3GL or some such shit).
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VirtualBox works for just about everything I've tried with a few exceptions (stuff that needed Direct Video access or 3GL or some such shit).
How many people with "must have" applications won't just obtain a second computer to run both the "must have" application and whatever it is they want that runs on a different OS?
Computers are cheap. So cheap that people will just buy a new one instead of bother with fixing even a minor detail on their old one. I have a pile of working laptops to play with because people gave them to me when the battery stopped holding a charge. These aren't "new-ish" MacBooks either where the battery is glued inside. R
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How many people with "must have" applications won't just obtain a second computer to run both the "must have" application and whatever it is they want that runs on a different OS?
I'd bet most of them won't.
Cheap? Maybe, depending on your income, but a lot of people will have trouble affording a 2nd PC. Also, the space and logistics for two PCs becomes unwieldy pretty quick. You either have to have two dedicated spaces each with mouse/keyboard/monitor, or hook them up with a KVM or Teamviewer or whatever.
But the real rub with two separate boxes is that it's harder to share data between them. (Harder but not an insurmountable obstacle.) It's just one more thing to work around.
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I'd bet most of them won't.
Cheap? Maybe, depending on your income, but a lot of people will have trouble affording a 2nd PC. Also, the space and logistics for two PCs becomes unwieldy pretty quick. You either have to have two dedicated spaces each with mouse/keyboard/monitor, or hook them up with a KVM or Teamviewer or whatever.
But the real rub with two separate boxes is that it's harder to share data between them. (Harder but not an insurmountable obstacle.) It's just one more thing to work around.
You want to argue that setting up a VM is cheaper and easier than NOT tossing out one's old laptop when buying a new one? I'm not seeing it.
In order to run a VM the computer has to have enough RAM, storage, and CPU power for two operating systems at a time. Someone on a slim budget is not likely to buy a PC with that kind of RAM and drive space. The kind of people with the need to access "must have" apps that will not run on the same OS will rarely be the kind of person that can't dumpster dive for enoug
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You made a lot of arguments that seem to prove my point. And then there was this:
First is that there's rarely a need to share data.
Right, no one shares data anymore, it was all just a fad. I mean, I've never needed to share data between two computers and neither has anyone else.
So I think we're done here. Enjoy your pleasant fantasy realm.
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Did I claim "never"? No, I saw it was needed "rarely". Did you read the second point? Where I point out the ease in which data is shared?
Whatever. Have a nice life.
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Beau, MsSmash, EditorDavid. I'm sorry you are the only thing there thinking you're slashdot. It's no longer "News for nerds" nor anything other than badly un-curated news from other websites.
And yet, still you post.
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Shake yo' dicks!
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While what you say may be true, you posted your whinge under a discussion about something of interest to nerds.
That makes you look like an idiot.
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What glory? Slashdot has not appreciably changed in the 20 years I've been coming here.
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Sure it has. Slashdot used to have the power to take down websites just by linking to them. Long gone are those days.
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Does MS Office 2019 or 365 work? (Score:2)
Possibly (Score:2)
I know someone who got an older version of Office to work in Wine, but they had to copy over some DLLs from real Windows to do it. This was a while ago, so I'm thinking Office 2007 maybe?
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Yes, but... (Score:2)
Will it run Solidworks yet? That's the last app I need a Windows partition for.
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> Will it run Solidworks yet? That's the last app I need a Windows partition for.
Does Solidworks know that? Of all the possible entities that might want Linux users to buy their software, Solidworks might be among the most amenable to using the compatible API's.
RSAT still unsupported (Score:2)
The day Microsofts "Remote Server Administration Tools" become supported, then I'll get excited about Wine. The fact that Warcraft made the Platinum List is of no use to me.