Wine Ported to OpenBSD (osnews.com) 23
Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. "Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well," writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won't work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.
Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
I certainly enjoy some port wine when involved with any kind of BDSM activities.
Re: Of course! (Score:3, Funny)
You're right there. Running anything on OpenBSD is exactly like BDSM.
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You're right there. Running anything on OpenBSD is exactly like BDSM.
Sooo, they...like it that way?
Wow. Clearly not your average penguin preener.
Is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD
Is it, though? The question is whether they are going to implement WOW support or not. There is a little discussion on the linked article about how it either is or isn't possible. If they are stopping here then it's not that exciting for most people who want to run Windows programs, because there's a surprisingly high percentage of 32 bit binaries out there.
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there's a surprisingly high percentage of 32 bit binaries out there.
Sounds like it's time to reverse engineer a whole bunch of programs and release new source code?
Heck, just this week one of my favourite abandonware games (2014 release IIRC) has had two different releases - in C++ and Rust - from different "developers", plus a multi-player mod from yet another. Crazy times with more to come.
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World Of Warcraft? That's cool.
Remember this date... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Remember this date... (Score:2)
If Linux is going to turn everything on their platform into AI-generated Rust code, maybe switching isn't such a bad move.
A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
That's great news! (Score:2)
This is pretty awesome to hear. I imagine in the future we'll have to shift away from Linux to BSD* anyway. When the masses are on Linux, ala Year of the Linux Desktop, it will most certainly be time to leave.
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Free, as in nothing out of pocket right away (like Windows 11)... don't worry, all the data that's collected and sold more than pays for it.
Until *Nix can run everything (without using a VM or emulator) that people use Windows for, it's not gonna catch on. Tried Libre on my laptop... opened a document I made entirely in Office 2016... document was made with the first page portrait, next two pages landscape, rest portrait... Libre opened it as everything landscape and would require a lot of rework.
Consideri
Re: That's great news! (Score:1)
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Interesting (Score:3)
Companies that sell control systems with proprietary software running on Windows could distribute their software running on Wine/OpenBSD as an appliance without reengineering the application.
Windows updates/hardware abandonment etc. are real headaches while control systems ought to be secure.
GPL virality has many vendors scared of linux appliances, warranted or not.
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WINE or emulators or VMs are not the solution. *Nix isn't the answer until it can install a Windows program (Office or a game from a disc... whatever) without using an emulator or VM.
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Right. You mean with a compatibility layer like WINE. And that's literally what WINE is. An implementation of the win32 platform for the Linux (and now BSD) kernel.
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Hint: without using WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator)
Sure, you can install games using GOG or Steam or whatever... that's not the only use of *Nix that anyone using it uses, and that's still using a compatibility layer.
Now, if it was a 100% seamless, no compatibility layer or VMs or WINE... where I can just run the Windows installer for Office or Diablo II and have it just work... then us geeks would be getting someplace.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Now, if any install of *Nix can install a Windows .EXE wi
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Hint: You cannot run win32 apps on a unix kernel without a compatibility layer of some kind! (Which is what WINE *is*.) There's no way around this to get seamless win32 binary support. You either need to have WINE integrated into the OS and desktop environment, or some other implementation of win32 in the OS that translates win32 calls into kernel calls and unix libraries for I/O, screen display, etc. Or some kind of hybrid kernel.
All of this is true whether you're running windows apps on *nix or wanting t
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I note that even a hybrid kernel would require a compatibility layer to provide all the userspace stuff including the the display environment, access to the Unix file system, etc.
As far as compatibility layers go, years ago there was one called Merge which supported win32 on Unix. It was a commercial offering. I actually used a derivative of this back in the windows 95 days to run Windows 95 apps on Linux. Sadly they never made the transition to supporting modern windows NT apps.
Longevity (Score:2)
Wine has been going for a good 30 years. I have occasionally wanted to use it... although "want" gives the wrong impression. I might have had some hardware device that could be used with Linux, but the official Windows application had some particulr function that I wanted to use occasionally.
The experience was always fraught with problems, brittle, and wouldn't work again after having been left fallow for a few months. This was true whenever I tried it though the project history.
But you have to respect the
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The experience was always fraught with problems, brittle, and wouldn't work again after having been left fallow for a few months. This was true whenever I tried it though the project history.
Wine has historically changed a lot from one major version to the next. Therefore if you got a Windows program working with Wine, and upgraded Wine, it would IME usually stop working. This isn't true any more, although it's still a danger. These days having multiple wine versions and using a launcher is a way to handle this. There is no problem running multiple wine versions at once.