Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Greatest Successes and Weaknesses With Wine (Software)? 252
wjcofkc writes: As a distraction, I decided to get the video-editing software Filmora up and running on my Ubuntu box. After some tinkering, I was able to get it installed, only to have the first stage vaporize on launch. This got me reflecting on my many hits and misses with Wine (software) over the years. Before ditching private employment, my last job was with a software company. They were pretty open minded when I came marching in with my System76 laptop, and totally cool with me using Linux as my daily driver after quickly getting the Windows version of their software up and running without a hitch. They had me write extensive documentation on the process. It was only two or three paragraphs, but I consider that another Wine win since to that end I scored points at work. Past that, open source filled in the blanks. That was the only time I ever actually needed (arguably) for it to work. Truth be told, I mostly tinker around with it a couple times a year just to see what does and does not run. Wine has been around for quite awhile now, and while it will never be perfect, the project is not without merit. So Slashdot community, what have been your greatest successes and failures with Wine over the years?
windows can run under linux so why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
if you're running windows wares you "lost the battle already", just run actual windows in a VM and your windows wares will run wonderfully.
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Re: windows can run under linux so why bother? (Score:2)
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And my laptop will burn through battery at brutal rates, all to be able to run a simple piece of software required to get my work done.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll keep running it in Wine, where it hardly eats any CPU and uses very little RAM, and for that matter runs faster than it does in Windows.
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Sorry I didn't realise the choice of OS was a battle.
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you're funny, people waste hours and days trying to twiddle and fiddle and solve wine issues, if they're solvable at all. If you want to play games from the 90s, install an old windows version and have a stable platform for playing with no fuss, the installation only needs to be done once after all.
Re:windows can run under linux so why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Or support open-source and buy a support license from the commercial version of Wine - Crossover from Codewavers [codeweavers.com]. These guys have made WINE setup and installation pretty damn easy. And they actually support the WINE project too, so it's all on the up and up.
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tl;dr Getting a separate computer just for Windows games.
I put a 16GB M.2 SSD into my motherboard (my primary SSD is normal SATA with Windows 7) and installed Linux on it. VMware player is installed on both operating systems, and I can boot each one from the other so I can load Linux to do stuff while I'm playing games, or I can load Windows to do stuff while I'm doing work. If one is going to have a single computer, this solution works great and Windows never steps on GRUB. A surprising number of games play acceptably in Windows on VMware hosted on Linux with th
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I can't really imagine having a mere 16GB for Linux.
It's plenty to run vmware and a web browser. I can't hibernate (I have 16GB RAM, too) but I don't need to, because boot time is sufficiently speedy (even with debian without-systemd.)
This I'm surprised with since Windows seems to complain when you massively switch hardware (to the point of triggering activation). How did you get around this?
I just booted it, and it worked. It's Windows 7, mind you.
I tried using VMWare Player. I wouldn't really call the game playing performance "acceptable".
It's on a per-title basis. Some games are great, some games are okay, some games are unplayable, and some games just crash.
Another major issue I had with VMWare is that each time I updated my kernel it'd break the drivers because apparently it's not properly hooked up to DKMS?
That may be, but it's easy enough to re-run the installer when you upgrade the kernel. There's probably a trivial way to make it happen automaticall
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However, since it sounds like you're not really wanting a CoLinux/CoWindows system, that's all pretty moot. At that level, I'd probably settle for mingw and just use my Linux system when I really wanted one.
I recently installed mingw. I'm a long time Cygwin user, and still use it for sshd. I got out of using mingw by scoring a binary for my particular case after loads of forum digging, but it's still installed. I have used colinux, and I think it's neato when it fits the use case, and I might try doing something with colinux and salt soon just for the laughs.
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Why would I maintain an entire Windows installation when I can just use Wine?
Because the application raises an unhandled exception and writes a memory dump when you start it under Wine. And even if you manually write the registry keys whose absence causes the exception, it freezes up in the settings dialog. Or when you're editing an instrument, one of the controls starts flashing, causing the entire application to become unresponsive. All three of these problems are true of the application 0CC-FamiTracker 0.3.14.6 on Wine 1.8, the version of Wine shipped with Debian 9.
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wine is more flexible too. Easier to use.
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Oh, I am sorry, I didn't know I could google for whatever passes as parent poster's opinion on something. I guess those damned corporation already extracted his thoughts and put them up publicly on display, must be my poor googling skills. Teach me, master, for I wish to learn... what is my opinion of you? Google it and tell me how you did it.
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No, I asked him to provide the parts of which he thinks are unfair.
The fact that X is unfair or not is subjective - there is no such thing that is objectively unfair.
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Might not be fair to me, but might be fair to you.
Don't you have anything better to do than concocting these fractured logic ideas?
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Which EU country?
It doesn't matter, AFAIK it covers the whole of EU.
Broke and Working - here's my top 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Broken Badly and I wish they weren't: Skype, Fractal Painter, Newer Photoshop CS, just about all WWW browsers, and newer Outlook
Most of the time, one is simply backed into a corner when turning to Wine. I hate using it, but it's better than booting into Windows.
Re: Broke and Working - here's my top 5 (Score:2)
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You do know web browsers run natively and using WINE makes no sense right?
Right. If your life is limited to Slashdot and Facebook then yes, using Wine makes no sense. But for people who have a real job or hobby that depends on a Windows application, when Wine works it is much more practical than having to reboot or install a virtual machine.
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The only thing idiotic is claiming "You do know web browsers run natively and using WINE makes no sense right?". Although if you only meant that using Wine for running web browsers makes no sense then you would have more of a point, except for all the compatibility issues with various Intranet (synonym for badly designed) websites.
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The only idiotic thing I'm doing is responding to an obvious troll.
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IE and Edge don't run naively. They don't work decently under Wine either though.
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Broken Badly and I wish they weren't: Skype,
Microsoft have a Skype client for Linux.
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I found SmartGit works well, but Visual Studio and apps that use its shell like Atmel Studio tend to fail under WINE.
Kind of surprised that Linux doesn't have really a great, free graphical Git client and a similarly excellent IDE. Stuff like Eclipse is okay, but especially when it comes to sell well supported platforms like embedded it tends to fall far short. You can sort of bodge it all together with scripts and external apps, but why make an already tricky job even harder?
Oh, and QQ International works
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As far as Skype is concerned, run the native Preview [skype.com]. It's pretty good.
alpha stage game (Score:3, Interesting)
I got a recent strategy pc game to run fine (albeit slowly). Heres the catch: i was an early alpha tester and the game didnt even have textures yet. The game developer was shocked when i told him it worked
Re:alpha stage game (Score:5, Funny)
The game developer was shocked because the game had been released 6 months ago and had all features implemented... but under Wine it looked like an early alpha with no textures.
Re: alpha stage game (Score:2)
I was actually running Starcraft II just a few months ago and it worked great. But, with Blizzardâ(TM)s regular patches they finally managed to break it for me. Now it works right up until I start a match and then crashes.
"Success" (Score:4, Informative)
My greatest success was giving up and just using a full windows VM under Parallels.
Fiddling with wine is fine when you're living alone with nothing better to do. But when you have stuff you need to get done, the last thing you have time for is fiddling around with esoteric settings and figuring out why your particular version of a DLL won't work just so you can get your chosen app running.
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I guess it's a matter of whether your employer is willing to expense $200 for Windows [microsoft.com] and $80 for Parallels Desktop.
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I guess it's a matter of whether your employer is willing to expense $200 for Windows and $80 for Parallels Desktop.
If the alternative is to spend even one or two days total dicking around with Wine, it's money well-spent. Of course, I would ideally find an alternative to running Windows software, but we all know that's not always feasible.
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I guess the extent to which $280 is worth it depends on the exchange rate between your country's currency and the United States dollar.
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Considering that I don't use a single blessed thing in my VM that requires OpenGL, I'd say it's working just fine, TYVM. :)
I have a separate windows laptop that I use for games. For any real work, I use a Mac cause I need a machine that I can rely on that won't spontaneously reboot or force a major configuration change on me without my permission.
Extensive documentation? (Score:2)
"They had me write extensive documentation on the process. It was only two or three paragraphs, ..."
Perhaps something is missing here - but, in most contexts, "two or three paragraphs" is nowhere near "extensive" documentation. That's more along the lines of "better than nothing".
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WoW (Score:3)
iTunes (Score:3)
iTunes 7 (which was about the newest version that would work with my netbook) worked fine, as it was the only way to play my FairPlay DRM'd stuff.
as another poster said, everything else was native alternatives (LibreOffice, GIMP) or native browser
16-bit programs? (Score:3)
I have a 16-bit program (originally run under Windows 3.0) which I believe the only way to run now is under Wine.
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The other option is use a VM
But then according to the EULA, you technically have to buy two Windows licenses: one for the host and one for the guest. This can get expensive at $199.99 each (source [microsoft.com]).
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I don't think that's true. But it's easy enough to install an XP VM in Win 7, and that will run Win 3.0 stuff.
a while (Score:2)
Two words.
Successes? (Score:2)
Successes?
I have never accomplished to get anything working with Wine. Not even with hours upon hours of manual, help pages, forum, etc. reading.
What a horrible piece of forever-incomplete, always unstable, butt-ugly malware it is.
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That's because wine only supports applications that already have dozens of better native Linux alternatives. If you want to run something that only runs under Windows and has no Linux equivalent it is almost guaranteed not to work. E.g. they only reason I've ever wanted it was to run proprietary software designed to update proprietary hardware over USB. But wine mysteriously thinks that it's 1995 still and doesn't bother with USB support.
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Amen. Never got WINE to run anything much reliably despite hours wasted farting about with it. Got bored and bought Parallels to run XP on the Mac (which it does very well) - since I don't use Win7 anymore I might try that. But I'm too old to have the time to spend frigging around with perpetually-alpha software.
I'm not a gamer (apart from the Myst/Riven etc., universe), so apart from Paint Shop Pro, I don't have much reason to.
Linux now has good equivalents for almost anything I use on Windows and if
Unusual Wine Story with IE6. (Score:5, Interesting)
I could list a bunch of other stories, of games and fun stuff, but Ages ago, just before I graduated with a Bachelors Degree, in the far off year of 2008, I had to take this Statistics Course that was unrelated to my Major. It was like one of those Dangling Gen-Ed courses. It was done completely online and it absolutely required Internet Explorer 6.x
You could NOT do the tests on anything else. So I had a Dell Ubuntu Laptop that Ran I think it was Hardy Heron, that had a Wine Isolated Prefix that ran IE6 just for this site. This course was a miserable slog of difficulty, and it required alot of studying and concentration, and then, came the day, of the online Final Exam which had to be Proctored by a Certified Disabilities Coordinator for my case.
I get in the Computer lab, they all run XP... and they all run Internet Explorer 7. Not one system will load the site to take the exam. I brought my laptop with me, and the Disabilies Coordinator contacted the Professor and gave the OK for me to bot up my Linux Laptop, plug it into the Ethernet Jack, and take the exam... I made a B. But had I not had my Wine capable laptop running Linux and IE6, I'd have failed that exam, and likely the class.
The next semester, the entire IE6 application that was made on was redone in Flash and suddenly worked in FireFox with the Linux Flash NPAPI module.
WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe. (Score:3)
WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe.
This is because they always counted the number of API calls they succeed in handling, and then the one they failed at was "just that one".
So you always had "((N-1)/N * 100)% of calls worked!".
To get you over that hump, you've always had to to go with a commercial version of WINE, like CrossOver, where they don't ever shove the final fixes back into the actual WINE code -- despite the GPL.
If the WINE guys are diligent, and go over the published GPL'ed code, and bring the changes back, that's fine, but... there's always this huge latency.
So from day one, they lied with statistics, and when something started running, then hey, that was great, but not everything was going to run.
Today, it's more disappointing, since unless you run older Windows programs, from older versions of Windows, things are back to broken.
Re:WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe. (Score:5, Informative)
This is because they always counted the number of API calls they succeed in handling, and then the one they failed at was "just that one".
So you always had "((N-1)/N * 100)% of calls worked!".
I have never seen that claim made by any Wine developer. Source please.
To get you over that hump, you've always had to to go with a commercial version of WINE, like CrossOver, where they don't ever shove the final fixes back into the actual WINE code -- despite the GPL.
That's a lie:
$ git log origin/master | grep Author: | head -n 10
Author: Nikolay Sivov <nsivov at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jactry Zeng <jzeng at codeweavers.com>
Author: Huw Davies <huw at codeweavers.com>
Author: Fabian Maurer <dark.shadow4 at web.de>
Author: Vincent Povirk <vincent at codeweavers.com>
Author: Aric Stewart <aric at codeweavers.com>
Author: Nikolay Sivov <nsivov at codeweavers.com>
10 commits, 9 by CodeWeavers developpers. So much for CodeWeavers never sending back patches!
CodeWeavers commits fixes and improvements to Wine first. The benefit of using CrossOver is that it is more up-to-date than Wine Stable, but still goes through a phase of testing and stabilization before it gets into the users hands so it is less buggy than the Wine nightlies.
Also Wine is LGPL, not GPL. Not that it makes any difference in this case.
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I see you have the git repo there. Are you a codeweavers person or a wine person? I'd love some help getting UnrealEd 3 working properly. It's the only thing I miss from my windows days. The response on the wine bugtracker wasn't at all helpful, even though I gave all the requested info and Running With Scissors offered free copies of Postal 2 to anybody willing to help. One guy took a free copy and we never heard another word from him. This show-stopping bug [winehq.org] has been open for over 3 years and is still mark
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most modern software nowadays has an OSX version.
Unless it's from a small business that hasn't yet received enough revenue from license sales to buy enough Macs for testing. You would end up seeing something like this:
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most modern software nowadays has an OSX version.
Unless it's from a small business that hasn't yet received enough revenue from license sales to buy enough Macs for testing. You would end up seeing something like this:
if it's from a small business that hasn't received enough revenue from license sales to buy enough Macs for testing you are more likely to see:
Greatest Success? (Score:2)
Learning to not care about the OS and going with the one that gives me the largest ecosystem of quality software.
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I agree, I've been running Linux exclusively since the mid-to-late 90s for home use and I've never needed Wine for anything.
Stock-trading platforms (Score:3)
Success: Questrade IQ Edge (Canadian broker)
Weakness: Fidelity Active Trader Pro (US broker)
Details:
Questrade IQ Edge works quite well under Wine, although it freezes if I try to minimize its window.
Fidelity Active Trader Pro almost finishes starting up, but fails at the last moment with an unhelpful error message. Funny thing is, Fidelity uses Crossover (a Wine derivative) to run Active Trader Pro on Macs. I'm wondering whether it's worth buying the Linux version of Crossover.
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Note that CrossOver has a free trial version [codeweavers.com]. So the simplest way to figure out whether it's worth it would be to try it out.
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And the only reason you had any need for IQ edge was because their online platform ran Silverlight for who knows what reason. Silverlight?!?! There's no getting THAT to work on Linux!
Luckily the online platform now works on real computers and I haven't used IQ edge since.
I also wouldn't call IQ edge a full "success". About every 3rd time you open the app it will fail to run because you need to update it first (I've never seen any app that needed so frequent updates, especially with no noticable changes ever
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And the only reason you had any need for IQ edge was because their online platform ran Silverlight for who knows what reason. Silverlight?!?! There's no getting THAT to work on Linux!
Lately I have had no problems in linux with either IQ Edge or their website (aside from some network access problems due to my ISP that took awhile to straighten out.) I'm not sure what your Silverlight issue is.
Luckily the online platform now works on real computers and I haven't used IQ edge since.
Please define what a "real computer" is?
I also wouldn't call IQ edge a full "success". About every 3rd time you open the app it will fail to run because you need to update it first (I've never seen any app that needed so frequent updates, especially with no noticable changes ever) , and while on Windows you can basically click the update button on the popup, wait a minute, and be running the new version, on Linux under wine you have to manually go to their website, find and download the update manually, unzip it, manually copy the files in to the correct locations, and then relaunch the app.
I have had success using wine staging [wine-staging.com] which is a more cutting-edge release of wine. As for IQ Edge updates, there have been a few this year, but the number hasn't been excessive. And when the updates happen, I have found that my Wine/Linux system (Ubuntu 16.04
Skyrim (Score:4, Interesting)
I think what impressed me most was Skyrim working pretty much out-of-the box. It needed a little prodding to set the amount of VRAM up correctly, but apart from that it Just Worked. It was the first game where I'd not even bothered trying to run it via Windows at all.
Windows hobbled on for a bit longer, occasionally curling up into a ball because I dared to put two PCIe cards in back in slightly different slots, or add a new disk for the ZFS array to use. Then, when it finally self-destructed entirely, I realised that I didn't need it anymore because all the windows games I had were working well enough under WINE. Last year I was persuaded to try Wolfenstein: New Order, and Old Blood - again, they worked out of the box which was impressive. Not sure I'll be so lucky with New Colossus.
Games aside, it's also been very handy for running an ancient version of SONAR I've been using since about 2002. That also had the advantage of allowing me to keep using a USB MIDI interface which Windows 7 had no support for.
Biggest disappointment was Fallout 4, which did not work out of the box and still isn't working as far as I know, though it's getting very close. FO3 and New Vegas are working happily though, even as it gets more and more difficult to run them under Windows itself.
Obviously your mileage may vary. If you have more space and more money to throw at hardware than I do, getting a second machine - or indeed a games console - would achieve the same results with less hassle, and less cat-fighting over the boot block than a dual-boot system. Faffing around with PCIe passthroughs to get a virtual windows instance is another possible approach, but I'd have to buy another licence for an operating system I actively dislike. Besides SONAR, all my day-to-day software is linux-based, so for me, Wine is a really good way of stringing it all together.
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If you have more space and more money to throw at hardware than I do, getting a second machine - or indeed a games console - would achieve the same results with less hassle
Windows might be the better option because the console won't run game mods.
Firefox with Silverlight (Score:2)
All because Bluecat IPAM requires the Silverlight crap, and I was sick of firing up a VM or VDI *just* to adjust permissions on a DNS or IP record
Successes: 0. Fails: 3-4 (Score:4)
That job ended in '03 (startup ran out of money), and little did I know it would be the last time I'd work in a *nix environment. Why? Cygwin. I could run Windows, get all the Windows programs, and still use the *nix command line tools for software development. Turns out, unless you're writing device drivers (or something I've never written), you can get by just fine with cygwin.
I'm about to change my Win10 box to Linux. Why? Not telemetry. Not because games have become "good enough" under Linux. No. I'm sick and tired of closing my laptop for dinner, opening it up an hour later, only to find the goddamned thing has rebooted. Fuck that shit. I hate the telemetry, not a fan of the Win10 UI, like my games. But FFS, it sucks when I can't count on opening a laptop and going back to what I was doing when I closed it.
Random rebooting. 3 words. Fuck That Shit.
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What I also hate is when I start Win10 up and I have to wait 15 minutes because the bloody thing is updating itself. Why can't it do that in the background, or at least let me choose when I f*** want it to update??
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No. I'm sick and tired of closing my laptop for dinner, opening it up an hour later, only to find the goddamned thing has rebooted
If you can't even RTFM and get the most basic of Windows settings right you're not going to be happy with Linux.
Running a WABI environment (Score:2)
Back when Wine was alpha grade software, I had a copy of Red Hat's branded WABI installed on my Slackware system. I launched Wine to run the progman.exe file in the WABI Windows environment and it loaded up the whole Windows 3 desktop.
It was pretty cool.
The Penguin Hutchinson Library CD. (Score:2)
Dialog's Production Line Tool failed. (Score:3)
Dialog Semiconductor's Production Line Tool (a GUI-driven BLE chip programming tool) was not available to run under Linux - or anything but Windows 7, 7-pro, 8, or 8.1 - all now made of unobtanium.
It would run (kinda) on wine with mono and a real Microsoft .NET install. But some important GUI components didn't render correctly, so necessary operator feedback fields were not readable, making it unusable.
(When our 7-Pro machine goes belly-up the lab is toast.)
Windows == single-source critical resource (Score:2)
I don't understand why no government has invested in Wine.
The NSA intercepts and modifies Cisco routers, introduces vulnerabilities in security standards, does not hesitate to intercept Google's cross-datacenter traffic, forces US ISPs to install black boxes for monitoring, and pulls all kinds of other stunts. But despite Microsoft being in the same jurisdiction as the NSA and possibly subject to various secret orders, most countries just happily depend on Windows, going so far as using it in their armies
Diablo 3 out of the box on release day (Score:2)
Having used wine since the 90s, it was still quite a milestone for me at least that I was able to buy Diablo 3 on release day, install and play it in wine without problems, I played that game all the way to the end. Platinum. Bravo Wine devs, Bravo.
Adobe Audition 1.0 (Score:2)
Works flawlessly in Wine, and is still better than Audacity. Hell, Cool Edit from 1998 is better than Audacity.
Other Wine wins:
Half Life 1 (pre Steam)
UltraVNC viewer (better than remmina)
Keil uVision, except for debugging.
Success: Fallout 3. (Score:2)
Works like a charm.
Other than that, I tend to avoid Wine and also don't really need it these days.
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powerpoint viewer (Score:2)
work & home (Score:2)
When i started working, they still used Lotus Notes as a mail server in the late 90's. Ofcourse there was no native Linux client, but it worked perfectly in wine.
At home, also around that period, or maybe a little later, i used a product from codeweavers to enable windows only browser plugins. It was a sad period on the internet when a lot of sites used plugins that were not available on Linux, worked fine using the codeweavers wine browser implementation (although, a bit high on CPU usage).
Other than that,
It runs the Sony Entertainment virus (Score:2)
Adventure Game Studio (Score:2)
I review free adventure games for Adventure Gamers [adventuregamers.com] each month. Many of them are made in Adventure Game Studio [adventureg...udio.co.uk]. These run perfectly in wine on the Mac. I hardly ever have to reboot into Windows to be able to play a free adventure game.
Almost all of my Windows programs work (Score:2)
From Win3/NT I've run almost every version of windows in a dual boot manner. Many programs I use are an install once, move many.
I created a separate directory for them off of the C: Drive, and installed them there.
Now with Linux Mint I can go to that programs directory, right click on the executable, and run with wine. It works very well for me.
My only loss is PowerPro http://powerpro.cresadu.com/ [cresadu.com] it's so integrated into Windows it's a waste of time trying to get it to work.
Kindle (Score:2)
Failure: I have never trusted Wine enough to run Turbotax on it.
Empire At War (Score:2)
Getting direct X working and running the game was cool!
Make sure you have the right drivers for your graphics card under linux!
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Yes, that is what the OP proposed as a topic of conversation.
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Re: Photoshop (Score:2, Informative)
emulation (Score:2)
I think that relates to "native performance" and "no emulation".
It happens that games usually rely on an API (Direct X up to 11) that doesn't exit on Linux and has no close equivalent.
For games you need a whole emulation layer that will emulate a Direct X API by using the closest API Linux has (usually OpenGL).
Lots of games DO work, but they still get some performance hit and require an emulation of sort (even if a high-level one).
Though currently, the things are changing :
- Most games are slowly switching
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Exactly this. The only things I ever need Windows for are for connecting proprietary devices via USB to make configuration tweaks or update firmware. These devices have no software for any OS other than Windows, and require a USB connection to do the updates.
Wine can't do that, which means Linux can't do that. Which means I need a full blown Windows install available to me just to update junk hardware.
Beyond that I see absolutely zero reason to run any Windows only program. There's so much high quality soft