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Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything

Dropbox integrates with GNU/Linux bettter than Google Drive and OneDrive do. Consider what happens when I visit each of three major cloud storage services' sync client download page using Firefox on Linux:

Yep, for a while now: https://www.winehq.org/news/20...

Sort of... Well, DOSBOX really.

Except that MacOS is a GUI OS and hence a lot more effort than DOSBOX.

(DOSBOX is a combination 32 bit x86 processor, MS-DOS and BIOS emulation all combined. Wine doesn't actually include a CPU emulator.) This does, to allow M68k code to run on other chips.

Illustrator is for vector art, not painting. And Krita 4 added a bunch of vector art features while further strengthening its lead in painting.

For photo/image work Gimp is fine and gets major improvements every release. The only people missing Photoshop on Linux are ones that only know that interface, which is hardly the best possible. The big deal is the price per seat: $0.00 for Gimp.

If you must run Photoshop on Linux then go ahead and run it.

Agree with parent. ProtonDB/Wine looks good on paper, but really, doesn't support most of what I'd like to play. I haven't played half of the assassin's creed games yet
I play heroes of the storm daily, which works...only on lowest graphics settings.
gta 5 doesn't seem to work either, unless stuttering is acceptable. Pretty much anything that I would like to play has some major issues.
At least world of warcraft seems to work, which I've been considering playing again.

I use lightroom for my hobby photography as well, which kind of works, but only when you are lucky.

Agree with parent. ProtonDB/Wine looks good on paper, but really, doesn't support most of what I'd like to play. I haven't played half of the assassin's creed games yet
I play heroes of the storm daily, which works...only on lowest graphics settings.
gta 5 doesn't seem to work either, unless stuttering is acceptable. Pretty much anything that I would like to play has some major issues.
At least world of warcraft seems to work, which I've been considering playing again.

I use lightroom for my hobby photography as well, which kind of works, but only when you are lucky.

Agree with parent. ProtonDB/Wine looks good on paper, but really, doesn't support most of what I'd like to play. I haven't played half of the assassin's creed games yet
I play heroes of the storm daily, which works...only on lowest graphics settings.
gta 5 doesn't seem to work either, unless stuttering is acceptable. Pretty much anything that I would like to play has some major issues.
At least world of warcraft seems to work, which I've been considering playing again.

I use lightroom for my hobby photography as well, which kind of works, but only when you are lucky.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objec... Overwatch plays on Linux. With Proton from Valve the list of games that you cannot play on Linux grows smaller every day. I am running Artix with XFCE and Steam and have over 300 native games. With Wine and Proton I could probably add a few hundred more of my 700 owned games to the list.

Will Wine then have to become actually an emulator?

I suspect you'll have to run it in a VM. 64-bit WINE exists, however there is a major incompatibility with 64-bit macOS that causes issues, where the only workaround appears to be using emulation.

Yaz

Wine no longer stands for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator', it's just "Wine":

https://www.winehq.org/about "Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") "

and in fact it originally stood for "Windows Emulator":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"The name Wine initially was an abbreviation for Windows Emulator.[16] Wine later shifted to the recursive backronym Wine Is Not an Emulator in order to differentiate the software from CPU emulators.[17] No code emulation or virtualization occurs when running a Windows application under Wine.[18] "Emulation" usually would refer to execution of compiled code intended for one processor (such as x86) by interpreting/recompiling software running on a different processor (such as PowerPC). While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine"

Installing a GTK+ app or installing a Qt app.

If an app's developer or distributor explicitly supports use of the app in Wine, you can add "installing a Wine app" to that list. The featured article is about a distributor adding such support.

Not only am I fairly sure that's now how the software stack looks so the latter may not exist/disappear and the software can still function

Likewise, Wine's GDI is flexible enough to be adapted to Wayland or other non-X graphics stacks.

Ya see this is the problem that the FOSSies just don't seem capable of grasping, every single person using Windows has some programs they consider "must have" or there is no point in having the PC...and none of it works on Linux. Sure you might come up with a wine layer for MS Office or QuickBooks (does QuickBooks even work in 2018? haven't looked in years) but that is 2 programs out of several million

Your argument is the whole premise behind Wine: Let users switch to Linux despite that one Windows-only application they absolutely must have. And fortunately Wine runs a lot more than the two applications you mentioned. Close to 44% of the applications in Wine's AppDB are rated Platinum or Gold, meaning they can be made to work perfectly. So users trying games, office or even their obscure must-have genealogy or knitting application have a good chance at success. This proves applications can work and that a lot more would if a bit more effort was put into Wine.

Regarding hardware the situation is really not as bad as you describe, though I agree that the printer / scanner situation is not great. The fix to that is very clearly to buy HP. For everything else I have not run into issues for years.

Ya see this is the problem that the FOSSies just don't seem capable of grasping, every single person using Windows has some programs they consider "must have" or there is no point in having the PC...and none of it works on Linux. Sure you might come up with a wine layer for MS Office or QuickBooks (does QuickBooks even work in 2018? haven't looked in years) but that is 2 programs out of several million

Your argument is the whole premise behind Wine: Let users switch to Linux despite that one Windows-only application they absolutely must have. And fortunately Wine runs a lot more than the two applications you mentioned. Close to 44% of the applications in Wine's AppDB are rated Platinum or Gold, meaning they can be made to work perfectly. So users trying games, office or even their obscure must-have genealogy or knitting application have a good chance at success. This proves applications can work and that a lot more would if a bit more effort was put into Wine.

Regarding hardware the situation is really not as bad as you describe, though I agree that the printer / scanner situation is not great. The fix to that is very clearly to buy HP. For everything else I have not run into issues for years.

Yes, I am very disappointed in AMD's processors not 100% compatible with Intel's. For comparison, look at Wine's perfect replica of all Windows bugs and proudly mentions this as a feature. Come on, AMD. Get in the game!

I think you're looking for Wine

Nope https://dl.winehq.org/wine-bui...

So first you accuse the parent of being factually wrong, and then proceed to point to an *emulator*.

And if that wasn't bad enough, lets look at the compatibility reports provided by Wine:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...

Out of all the various versions of Photoshop, only *two* are marked as Platinum. The last one being CS5 from 2010. Everything else is less, which means everything else is problematic to a varying degree.

And this doesn't even consider the OTHER key aspects of Photoshop usage, such as using a wacom tablet. Want pressure sensitive strokes? HAHAHAHAHA FOOL!

You can search by app here. PS CC18, at least, has a "gold" rating, meaning you should not have any trouble with it. The CC suite is one of those "we better get this right" apps they prioritize during development and testing.

Some people wanted both small and cheap. These people are probably best served with a cheap Android tablet and a folding Bluetooth keyboard. If you want Windows, that's a problem.

I don't want Windows, but I do want FCEUX (debugging version) and FamiTracker. Those are free software under the GNU GPL, and I currently run them in Wine, but Wine isn't so practical on ARM. Winelib on Android was "a work-in progress" as of 2014, and the project's page hasn't been updated.

At least Wine does."

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 has been open for over 3 years and is still marked "unconfirmed" despite being confirmed by multiple people. Before that there was another show-stopping bug dating back to about 2008 (which did eventually get fixed). The day I can run UnrealEd again will be a day of celebration.

Native apps work

Only on one operating system. Good luck (legally) running a native app distributed as a .dmg on anything but a Mac.

Nope. Windows runs Linux binaries. FreeBSD runs Linux binaries. Linux, BSD, and macOS run Windows binaries. Windows 10 on ARM runs x86 Win32 binaries.

Then what else runs macOS binaries? I thought this was clear from "distributed as a .dmg", as .dmg is the archive format commonly used to distribute macOS applications outside the Mac App Store.

So until a particular developer can scrape together the budget to produce multi-platform releases, is the solution to test in Windows and in Wine on either FreeBSD or GNU/Linux, distribute Windows binaries, and expect users of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS to use Wine? If so, this strategy still misses mobile.

And that's not even mentioning of cross platform native applications. I use the same web browser and email client on all three operating systems I regularly use.

That's because the Chrome and Firefox web browsers and the Thunderbird mail client have enough of a budget for multi-platform development and testing. A hobbyist or startup may not have enough financial resources to launch simultaneously on all native platforms. "Just use Qt" isn't enough; a developer still has to buy the appropriate hardware (namely a Mac with enough RAM to run the other operating systems in VMs) and spend labor on testing on all supported operating systems.

Native apps are also OS-specific. Only on one operating system.

Nope. Windows runs Linux binaries. FreeBSD runs Linux binaries. Linux, BSD, and macOS run Windows binaries. Windows 10 on ARM runs x86 Win32 binaries.

And that's not even mentioning of cross platform native applications. I use the same web browser and email client on all three operating systems I regularly use.

How are native applications only on one operating system again?

Someone who can help management get something for nothing. People who can understand the licenses and allow the company to use as much as possible without paying for it, while avoiding the pitfall of in-house software becoming open source because someone was lazy.
Ideally, someone who can also eke free support out of open source, getting others to fix bugs for free.

You say that like it's something new and something which must be bad. FOSS has always been challenged by projects which wanted to suck its life blood taking away source code, expertise and the time of the people involved in the projects. Projects have always solved this with simple rules such as giving support to contributors first, simple steps like giving support in forums, where the answer to one user becomes the answer to all, with simple legal procedures such a starting a foundation and ensuring that they use a copyleft license like the AGPL and with things like contributor agreements (or again copyleft) and contribution tracking which ensure that contributions really have to be valid.

Once you have things like this in place, the easiest and cheapest way to get support becomes being involved in the project and contribute. Projects which fail to build this up either realise their problem and are forced to change or end up losing huge amounts of support (e.g. as the FreeBSD lost people and users to OS/X).

Someone who can help management get something for nothing. People who can understand the licenses and allow the company to use as much as possible without paying for it, while avoiding the pitfall of in-house software becoming open source because someone was lazy.
Ideally, someone who can also eke free support out of open source, getting others to fix bugs for free.

You say that like it's something new and something which must be bad. FOSS has always been challenged by projects which wanted to suck its life blood taking away source code, expertise and the time of the people involved in the projects. Projects have always solved this with simple rules such as giving support to contributors first, simple steps like giving support in forums, where the answer to one user becomes the answer to all, with simple legal procedures such a starting a foundation and ensuring that they use a copyleft license like the AGPL and with things like contributor agreements (or again copyleft) and contribution tracking which ensure that contributions really have to be valid.

Once you have things like this in place, the easiest and cheapest way to get support becomes being involved in the project and contribute. Projects which fail to build this up either realise their problem and are forced to change or end up losing huge amounts of support (e.g. as the FreeBSD lost people and users to OS/X).

I don't think you understand how massive the Windows API is. Their stats page lists 114312 functions, granted 18k of those are forwards but that's still 96k real functions and 28k of them are just stubs in the WINE project. Of the 68k functions that do have a real implementation it's near impossible to say how many of them are completely and correctly implemented, since they don't actually conform to a specification only "whatever Windows does". And it's not like they're simple formulas, they're interfaces to huge state engines like DirectX. They could concentrate on one version all they want and probably still never finish the first one to perfection.

Fortunately for us there's a long tail of rarely used functions and dependencies on obscure bugs and behaviors. Implementing the mostly used functionality of the mostly used APIs does make the most common application work and then there's a never ending TODO list of bugs you could investigate. WINE is always going to be a band aid, they do more good staying current and relevant than trying to solve every corner case. And I think the argument really works just as well in reverse, by spending some effort on the small deltas they get a lot of software working and find bugs that benefit older software too. It's happened to me many times that old software works better with newer wine versions, even though they haven't had any patches directed at them.

Of course it also happens that they break things, regressions happen. But they're pretty good at fixing those if you can point to a working version (or better yet, bisect to find the offending patch). Overall I'd say the progress is positive, but it's no substitute for native applications.

Oh I understand. I also understand how much they're intertwined, built-off each other etc. You have to build a certain base level - starting with the NT Kernel - and them move up and out of the stack.

But what you're missing is that it's far easier to hit a stable-target than it is to hit one that's constantly moving. If you get NT4 (a much smaller target complete), then move to Win2k - the delta isn't that great. Move to XP, and again - the delta isn't that great (smaller than NT4->XP); and keep moving on. Additionally you'll have more and better software compatibility across the board instead of the hit-and-miss that it currently is.

I don't think you understand how massive the Windows API is. Their stats page lists 114312 functions, granted 18k of those are forwards but that's still 96k real functions and 28k of them are just stubs in the WINE project. Of the 68k functions that do have a real implementation it's near impossible to say how many of them are completely and correctly implemented, since they don't actually conform to a specification only "whatever Windows does". And it's not like they're simple formulas, they're interfaces to huge state engines like DirectX. They could concentrate on one version all they want and probably still never finish the first one to perfection.

Fortunately for us there's a long tail of rarely used functions and dependencies on obscure bugs and behaviors. Implementing the mostly used functionality of the mostly used APIs does make the most common application work and then there's a never ending TODO list of bugs you could investigate. WINE is always going to be a band aid, they do more good staying current and relevant than trying to solve every corner case. And I think the argument really works just as well in reverse, by spending some effort on the small deltas they get a lot of software working and find bugs that benefit older software too. It's happened to me many times that old software works better with newer wine versions, even though they haven't had any patches directed at them.

Of course it also happens that they break things, regressions happen. But they're pretty good at fixing those if you can point to a working version (or better yet, bisect to find the offending patch). Overall I'd say the progress is positive, but it's no substitute for native applications.

Would of course be nice, but I'd rather take a Linux port of the entire Creative Cloud as it stands. It would bring a lot of professionals over and give Linux a much higher standing as a workstation OS. If I were to spend money on getting the source code for a blob it would probably be for compatibility, like say the source code for MS Office or DirectX or nVidia's graphics driver. Then again, not very likely they'll sell it for any reasonable amount.

Looks like there's some progress though, you can now play Overwatch and GTA V is up to Bronze and Witcher 3 is now up to Silver. Still tough to be a gamer on Linux though, now my friends are talking about maybe trying Forza Horizon 3... looks like I'll need a Wintendo (Win10) box in the near future. Not letting that spyware near anything of importance, that's for sure. Bah, was hoping to avoid that a while longer...

Would of course be nice, but I'd rather take a Linux port of the entire Creative Cloud as it stands. It would bring a lot of professionals over and give Linux a much higher standing as a workstation OS. If I were to spend money on getting the source code for a blob it would probably be for compatibility, like say the source code for MS Office or DirectX or nVidia's graphics driver. Then again, not very likely they'll sell it for any reasonable amount.

Looks like there's some progress though, you can now play Overwatch and GTA V is up to Bronze and Witcher 3 is now up to Silver. Still tough to be a gamer on Linux though, now my friends are talking about maybe trying Forza Horizon 3... looks like I'll need a Wintendo (Win10) box in the near future. Not letting that spyware near anything of importance, that's for sure. Bah, was hoping to avoid that a while longer...

No, the AI's just need the message passing component, without any rendered visuals.

SC2 works fine under Wine though

Wine just announced it fixed the last compatiblity issues and Notepad is now a Platinum-certified app.

Notepad was rated as "Platinum" as of Wine 1.1.36. https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...
Wine 1.1.36 released on January 8th of 2010. https://source.winehq.org/git/...

Wine just announced it fixed the last compatiblity issues and Notepad is now a Platinum-certified app.

Notepad was rated as "Platinum" as of Wine 1.1.36. https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...
Wine 1.1.36 released on January 8th of 2010. https://source.winehq.org/git/...

I did. StarCraft used to work well under WINE, so I was hoping to play for nostagia's sake.

It installed just fine, but fails to run with a DLL issue. Hopefully with some investigation, the WINE gods can figure out the cause. :)

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42741

> ... despite that not being what Apple's literal statement said (because "Windows malware" only affects Windows, ...

With things like Wine I'm not sure that is a good strategy to bank on ...

When ReactOS (or equivalent) can do most anything Windows can do.

People & businesses want a drop-in replacement for Windows, and all their software that runs on it. Rewriting (or buying) software for another OS just isn't going to happen. And WINE isn't up to the challenge for graphic intensive games or device drivers.

Last I heard of Pinebook on Slashdot was a comment by vux984 mentioning it in passing.

But one disadvantage of switching from x86 and x86-64 to ARM and AArch64 is inability to run the occasional Windows application in Wine. My work flow includes a few Windows applications distributed as free software, such as FCEUX debugging version, FamiTracker, and Modplug Tracker. All are usable in Wine, even on a dinky little Atom CPU. If you go ARM, you're on your own recompiling them for linking with Winelib.

Or, you can run WINE on a MacBook.

I don't see how, seeing as Fitbit is rated "Garbage" in Wine AppDB.

Another question: If a Mac can run Mac-exclusive applications, Linux-exclusive applications, and Windows-exclusive applications, but computers from other computers can run only Linux-exclusive applications and Windows-exclusive applications, then how do other companies sell computers at all?

I had the same issue as you. I ended up choosing against the pain.
Of my ~360 Steam games at the time, only roughly 170 were working on Linux, a few more with Wine. Of course the 30 games I bought since are working fine : the more of us are switching, the faster the editors will follow.

Wine should be the next most important project for gamers on Linux.
You can already have the Witcher 3 menu working now which I find amazing, alas not the game itself (deferred shading support issue I think).

I suspect you're just trolling, but still:

aannd... still no Direct3D 9 support.

What? Of course there is.

If Wine was a commercial package, this problem would have been addressed one way or another

If you want a closed-source Wine, look at CrossOver.

Wine is an emulator and it's not an emulator. You can run a Windows executable on the runtime or you can compile Windows source code and run it as a native executable. The latter would be more useful for things like porting games.

The performance of an application ported through WineLib is going to be identical to the performance of the Windows binary running through Wine. So WineLib is no more and no less useful for games than it is for any other application.

What WineLib does buy you however is lots of complications with the compilation toolchain as soon as your code depends on Microsoft-specific C++ features like the omnipresent #import directive, Visual C++ project files (even with winemaker), or the MFC, etc. Things get complex pretty quickly if you also have third-party libraries or use other languages like Visual Basic or even C#.

I hear it runs Cygwin so there's that.

I'm trying to figure out why the heck anyone would want to do that, since both Mac and Linux offer a complete (and superior) shell already.

It's called a joke, you might want to read up on that :)

I hear it runs Cygwin so there's that.

I'm trying to figure out why the heck anyone would want to do that, since both Mac and Linux offer a complete (and superior) shell already.

I hear it runs Cygwin so there's that.

Yes it can. Some of the Engineers at my office used to run SolidWorks 2012 on CrossOver. Looks like Wine runs it with some workarounds:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...

Lots of features and bug fixes, including 64-bit support, but I suspect the typical WINE user will be more interested in a simple list of programs that now work with it.

But no Adobe, Autodesk, Maya etc.

1. Adobe is not a program or product. It's a brand. Are you saying that Photoshop doesn't run on Linux? Because there's alternatives y'know. Or you might be able to run PS CC 2015 under Wine.

2. Autodesk also isn't a program or product. It's a brand. Are you saying that AutoCAD doesn't run on Linux? Because there's alternatives y'know.

3. Maya does install and run natively on Linux

Of course, when it comes to software, Linux supports literally everything except MS Visual Studio.

But Linux doesn't run any of my business software.

You know https://www.winehq.org/, don't you? And if that can't help, noting stops you from using a VM on some desktops (on http://serpro.gov.br/ is that way now - an slow change [of several years] for a big company, since they choosed to only uns Linux on their desktops... [ex-employee here])

Also emulators exist (yes, WINE is an emulator, it's just not emulating hardware).

Have you had a good experience using Bluetooth devices in applications in Wine, such as a Fitbit device's sync application? AppDB reports Fitbit as "Garbage" because sync does not work.

Works pretty well for me:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...

Wait which WoT were you talking about?

Depends on which of the 69 bazillion versions you're referring to, and where you got it from, but overall the answer appears to be Yes.