Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge

polar_bear` writes "Last week, CodeWeavers issued a "Installer Challenge" to improve Wine "until it can run nearly every Windows program." Linux Magazine interviewed CodeWeavers Founder and CEO Jeremy White about the challenge, Wine on OS X on Intel, the Linux desktop and what is ahead for CodeWeavers. White has some pretty interesting answers."

Comments

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Mad Merlin]

I doubt you're serious, but to those reading this, Wine is quite fast regardless of whether or not you consider it an emulator or not (it is not). It isn't subject to the same kind of performance hit that an emulator like QEmu/VMWare/VirtualPC faces because Wine does not emulate hardware. I can for example play Diablo II under Wine at roughly 90% native speed, some applications are faster than this, some aren't quite as fast. Here's a few benchmarks if you don't believe me.

There are plenty of people who play new games like World of Warcraft and Half Life 2 under Wine without speed issues, so I'm not sure exactly where your claims are coming from.

A lot of this was covered in WWN

[Mad Merlin]

If you're looking for more information about this, Wine Weekly News for last week has two writeups on the issue. Basically the last of some very ugly and gritty DCOM work and related items has been finished in Wine. Installers are notorious for using these sorts of features and hence have generally been hit or miss in the past. This is a big step forward for Wine, sometime in the near future the vast majority of installers should work properly (hence the challenge).

A price quote from TFA...

[Mad Merlin]

"Sometimes what we do is really a dirty job. We let people run IE on Linux, and that's just sick and wrong..."

I'd be apt to agree...