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Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista
Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."
I wish UT3 worked...
(some people have reported success, but not me... sigh.)
"Every game but Blackthorne"
You mean Blizzard made a game before World of Warcraft?
-just to head this off-
I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).
Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.
Maybe this Linux thing isn't catching on quite as much as you think it is.
(not trying to troll, just an observation)
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Years ago, just after WoW's beta, I used to run it using cedega. There were still crashing bugs that would hose my friends machines and require rebooting back then; I would just restart cedega when one happened to me. In fact, I don't remember if I *ever* played WoW using a real Windows install. I quit fairly soon after beta though, less than a year.
I cant even start Wine... out of the box Kubuntu installation, all updates applied... system completely freezes... power button needed. So, for running the only game I care about (Ports Of Call), Vista is my platform... no problems there. Have a VIA C3 Nehemia - probably there is a Wine problem with it.
So this guy takes a whopping 5 games (out of thousands, and most quite obscure) and concludes that system BLA is better than system XYZ. Article mod: -1, Flamebait.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Wine by itself can't lock the system.
The usual cause of this is proprietary graphics drivers getting out of sync with the kernel.
If you're using nvidia drivers, try reinstalling them.
In my experience, gaming in Vista caused noticeable performance hits in every game I tried. I lost a 5-ish fps in oblivion, and up to 40 or more in source engine games. I haven't tried in awhile so I don't know if it's gotten any better but that was one of the main reasons for me switching back to XP. I have not tried any of the latest games such as cod4 or crysis in vista. I also did not try the most recent source engine games in orange box which allegedly use DX10 to help speed up some of the stuff vista slowed down. As for gaming in linux, that's something I don't do much because I prefer to get the max performance I can and wine/cedega just don't quite cut it. I do, however, use linux for just about everything else. :)
Weaksauce as they say...
Is a test that includes only 4 non-working games really a good indication of compatibility, and worthy of coverage on Slashdot? I certainly haven't had a problem with gaming on Vista, although I'm aware there's a few issues here and there.
I also did a search for one of the games listed - Darwinia - first two results on Google gave me a link to an update for Vista on the official site/forum. If he's using that (which he hasn't said either way) and still having lockups, I'd have thought there's some other issue there.
Let's see, on my Vista machine now I have the following games, unmodified that still work perfectly well in Vista, even if one or two need running in compatibility Win XP mode. List includes:
Quake 1-3, Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2, Unreal (classic), C&C95, Red Alert.
I mean, if Vista can run a DirectX 4 game, 6 major DirectX versions later, that can't be bad. All power to wine if it can do it too, but to suggest Vista is awful with games is pushing it.
throw new NoSignatureException();
If you review four games, where all except one is fairly unknown, and you get Vista to crash three of these games, you should probably do one of the following: A) Try with games that aren't filled with bugs (may I suggest some more mainstream titles that have regular patches coming out), or B) Check your hardware for broken component.
And you should probably try a few more games than that to be able to draw any conclusions at all.
I couldn't play Icewind Dale II in Windows XP. There are issues with many laptop input drivers screwing with the keyboard in that game. I couldn't resolve the problem, so I switched to linux, copied the Icewind Dale II directory, which was patched and had a no-CD crack, and it runs swimmingly. The only issue is that my linux cursor still shows on top of the game, but I rarely notice it.
I also remember trying to play Escape From Monkey Island(tm) in Windows XP, but there was this one part of the game that you couldn't get past (rowing up to Pegnose Pete's swamp shack). When playing The Curse of Monkey Island(tm), the cut-scenes would blaze past in seconds. I had to install Windows 98 to play the games. Compatibility mode didn't cut it. Other games that won't work in XP are Myst and Riven.
Laptop drivers are a bitch in Windows, and so I blame laptop manufacturers like Sony and Dell for making quirky hardware that need special drivers. I blame Microsoft for allowing such stupid driver issues to exist. Finally, I blame the developers for not using the APIs that they're supposed to be using, like DirectX, OpenGL, or SDL.
Just tried to install the first game on his list (Soldat) on my laptop running Vista 64 bit.
First run; no go. Soldat stops responding.
Start explorer, go to soldat directory, open soldat.exe properties. Set compatibility to Windows XP/SP2, disable Aero for this program, run as admin.
Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network.
I'm not even going to bother and try the other ones. This guy should have done his homework.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Here is what I wonder: How will the suites that provide emulation and Windows-compatible API hosts deal with Vista? Will they too eventually have to implement all kinds of crazy code that changes the way the Windows API behaves to make calls respond like they do in Vista, add in all the various "compatibility" and "security" shims that Vista implements to make newer Windows apps behave properly? After all, the developers will have built and tested their applications in this environment.
I wonder how projects such as Wine will ultimately deal with this issue.
I recently destroyed my graphics card and now i'm running linux with a standard gfx card that doesnt even work with midtown madness. Whats good games to test then? I've always wanted to try Fallout 2 more, but never got around to it because of it aged graphics. Now it probably would be good tho. Should i start with Fallout 1 or Fallout 2 or do you recommend some other games that do not need 3D card?
I'd just like to know where I can get my copy of Darwinia for under two bucks...
I play with Linux most of the time - it works great.
Martin
http://martin.krischik.com/index.php/Main/WoWOnLinux
What kind of garbage has this site become to? Jesus H. Christ, editor, can you do a more crappy job than this? As soon as an article mentions that a flavor of a MS product is shit, it is somehow news worthy here. WTF?!
I too play WoW on Linux - Without cedega that is. There is an endless discussion on the internal cedage forums about it - but the bottom line is: Sometimes it's better to use an up-to-date Wine with OpenGL instead.
The only thing which does not work is the Microphone - but it won't work the Linux version of Skype either so the trouble is elsewhere.
See my installation aid: http://martin.krischik.com/index.php/Main/WoWOnLinux
Martin
Seems to work for me and that is on a Vista 64-bit system, the most likely to have compatibility problems.
This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.
Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?
- Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
- I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
- I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
- I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.
That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.
Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.
Bullshit.
The NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver is rarely the cause of X or kernel hangs and crashes. In 2 years of using NVIDIA drivers on bleeding edge vanilla mainline kernels i've only had to wait for a new release *once* and *never* had a kernel panic that resulted from it.
You may have gone a bit overboard here. You should try just right-clicking and running as admin first before you change compatibility settings. That works for me on my 32-bit Vista installation, but perhaps you need the compatibility switches for x64. Still, I'd always try "run as admin" as the first troubleshooting step before going for appcompat switches.
As much as I'd like to stand around and say "Haha" and post a Nelson pic, this article is extremely uninformed and biased. Cedega/Wine can do some great things, but really now, people still don't know how to set an individual .exe's properties for OS compatibility?
Also, I think the setup might have some effect here. A GeforceFX? Jeebus. If you expect reasonable performance on that, I don't know what rock you've been under.
than
VIA drivers... was a hell to make 1366x768 work (on my LCD TV)... probably worth investigating if I can do something about X/drivers. Thanx
Pretty much all the games that I have wanted to try lately have worked very well under Wine. I've probably just been lucky though, I have no doubt there are a lot of games that don't work. In any case I've been very pleased and impressed with wine, and it just keeps getting better.
Here's what I've tried lately:
World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Portal, Oblivion, Heroes of Might and Magic III (yeah, there's a linux version, I know), Disciples II, Ignition, American McGee's Alice.
I've also just tried several fairly new demoscene productions, and to my suprise many of them also work extremely well. Some of them even work much better than under Windows XP on my integrated GPU, with no effects missing as far as I can see (and as far as wine reports).
This is some dodgy work to make the worst for Vista and then claim victory for Linux. What next? Claim Vista is broken because you can't use the Mac drivers for your Wacom tablet yet with the right reverse engineering and tweaking you can get some mild workability in Gentoo?
Slashdot: Where opinions are just opinions until you have mod points.
Absolutely, which is why you don't go there unless you start having problems. Honestly, in the year I've been running Vista Soldat is the first game where I've had to run as admin to get it to play (and I only did that to debunk the article, I have no real interest in the game itself) and probably only the second or third time that I've had to use "run as admin" on any application at all (VS2k5 claims that it wants you to run as admin, but it will work perfectly well even if you don't).
Unfortunately, this is the type of behavior you often see from small/independent/FOSS developers who are not necessarily clear on the concept of Windows development best practices (Soldat is a perfect example, as it doesn't even default to the "standard" installation location of %programfiles%). What's annoying is that Soldat has had a year to fix the issue and still hasn't even though they had three releases since Vista shipped (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2). I guess the current work-around is "good enough", but this isn't really something you can blame on Microsoft and Vista -- Soldat would've failed just as spectacularly if you had tried to play it in XP with a low-privilege account. The only difference is that Vista makes it easy to use a low-privilege account day-to-day and XP didn't.
Here's some ones I'd love to see. All of them work on 64-bit Vista, no tweaks needed:
World of Warcraft
Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
Command and Conquer 3
Hitman: Blood Money
Gears of War
Civilization 4: Beyond the Storm
Those are 6 I've got installed on my system right now. They are fairly modern titles, and all quite a bit of fun. All of them run in Vista 64-bit without issue. I haven't had to even turn on the compatibility mode, they all run as is. How's that go under Wine? Can you run all those (and I don't mean start, I mean play without problems)? If not, then perhaps Linux compatibility ISN'T as good as Vista.
Talk about a retarded article. It really becomes clear near the end that he's just looking for problems. The error with Civ 4 isn't a "You can't use this," it is just what it says: That version has known issues (related to Safedisc I believe). So what is the answer? Well had he asked it for a solution, it'd probably tell him to get the patch from Firaxis. Do that, and Civ 4 runs great.
Also the guy apparently is either a total moron, or just lazy. He claims he can't get Blackthorne to work in DOSBox. Ummm, well, don't know what to tell him, it works fine in my copy. Sound works, graphics work, etc. My guess is he knows nothing about DOSBox and doesn't know that the "auto" cycles don't work in some cases. This is one of them, you have to increase it to get the game going (you can set it to auto once in the game). Also not at all sure how DOSBox is supposed to test anything. One of the features of DOSBox is that it does full emulation and is highly portable. So you can run it on any platform it has been ported on and it'll work. Vista's issue would be to run DOSBox (which it does just fine). It is then DOSBox's issue to run a given game.
I mean really, are people this desperate for Vista to fail that this is the kind of crap they publish? A test of 4 games, by a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, one of which is a DOS game (and thus not a test of Vista, but of DOSBox). Wow, ya, that is real compelling there. I wonder if people think that FUD like this really is going to stop Vista adoption.
This happened to me when my brother bought SimCity 4. He was unable to play it (on winXP) but I was playing it with Cedega from his hard drive using his hidden shares (C$, D$, etc).
I'd still advice people to get a Nintendo for gaming and let the PC do the rest. If you really want to game on the PC, Tux Games has plenty of 'em, and wine does indeed run many (mostly GL based) games, like Half-Life/counterstrike, Command & Conquer, warcraft (except 1), far cry, battlefield, guild wars, elite force (and most other quake3-based games), eve online, most GTA games and many many more.
Also, when wine supports DX10, it'll be the only way of running DX10 games under XP (or any other OS that can run wine besides vista).
is to be incompatible with all the spyware, adware, and trojan-filled apps available.
Rewrite Windows so it becomes more secure, be gone with legacy junk they said... So Microsoft almost did it but kept some huge legacy still working in Vista. Now they scream "Oh noes, our old legacy stuff breaks!"... Damned if they do, damned if they don't. These so called "Articles" are getting ridiculous, even for Slashdot. Yes, seriously!
Check to see if a solution is available on the Microsoft website with options for "Check for solutions online" or "Run program". (IIRC, MS regularly releases pack of compatibility shims for different programs based on the number of "Do you want to send this information to Microsoft" crash reports).
TFA's response to this? To not allow the compatibility shimmer to check MS's website, but rather run the program anyway, with the comment "If you [Microsoft] know something is wrong, fix it." This despite the fact that, to any sentient observer, the dialogue box is attempting to get him to let Microsoft do... Ummm, just that. Presumably the author of TFA would prefer Microsoft to break into his house and install newly developed compatibility shims without his knowledge, rather than have to tolerate the chutzpah of -- *gasp!* -- asking him...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I'm just a bit too paranoid to right away break out the "run as admin" option as a first troubleshooting step. Process Monitor is a fantastic little tool for figuring out what an uncooperative app is trying and failing to access. Sometimes it's just a case of loosening permissions on one particular directory or reg key, and I like to try that before giving anything blanket admin privileges.
Bad form I know, I know. Dang /. for not having an "edit" option...
Here is the article I was referring to... and remember my OP was from memory so be kind...
http://www.viperlair.com/articles/editorials/vista/versus/
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
It's not just for Linux.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Guess what I do to run PowerPC applications on my Intel iMac?
Double click.
Why on earth do you put up with this shit? (Games?)
Agree, but not completely.
The argument that Linux is too complex has been used for years. It still is, but once my mother needs to right-click on an executable and wade through options I'd say "Game Over" for Windows as well. This is not what I call backwards-compatibility as it should be.
To be fair, running a game using Wine is probably more complicated for most.
Side note, I had problems running Baldurs Gate on my new AMD 64bit dual core with WinXP 32bit. Graphics were wrong and sound mis-aligned. Whatever I tried, I could not improve it. Then I decided to run it using Wine (never used wine before) in OpenSuSe 10.3, 64bit and guess what: works like a charm.
Reemi.
... run as admin.Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network. why should you have to run as admin? and should you really be running an app as admin which accesses the network?
sounds like a compelling argument against to me.
Come on... what a dumb headline. Linux does not run windows apps better... It may run certain games that dont run in vista... but that does not mean it runs windows apps better than vista. It means it runs SOME old games.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
...that Vista freezes/crashes because of an application, that is one of the main problems with Windows.
There's a native Linux binary for that :-) /me ducks.
Stick Men
I was concerned for a while about some sort of dogmatic ./ bias against Vista (and MS in general), but seeing all of these comments along the lines of "dumbass guy didn't even run his Windows right" brings back a bit of my faith in the scientific method. Or at least its application around these parts...
And that is why Windows is much easier to use then Linux. The people I know would already look at me as if I was a fish when I would try to explain step 1.
The last step (if I would ever get there) would result in running everything all the time as admin.
If this is your advice to people, you are to be blamed for all the spam I get.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Just recently I went to a LAN. I took my Warcraft 3 install with me (installed under Debian in Wine) and just copied the folder to everyones machine. I was surprised to find that one had Vist on it, and thought it wouldn't work.
But not only Warcraft 3, but all other games we tried that night didn't cause any problems with Vista. We had all kinds of games, old and new.
The point is that even with XP many games made for 9x don't work anymore. Same with Dos and Windows 9x. So with old games your success rate with Wine and Dosbox should be higher than with Vista of course. Not only games, but also many apps. This makes Wine so important for legacy apps and I am very happy to have it.
Point being that serious (not casual) gamers like to play current games. And those games run under Vista. You also need recent graphics hardware that has better support under Windows. The question to debate would be if current games run better under Vista or XP.
Maybe this guy didn't try hard enough. For example Civ4 has a copy protection that is less likeky to run on anything but a Windows XP. So, he could probably get it to run by downloading the crack, on both Linux and Vista.
Also it seems that he has some serious (graphical?) driver issues on Vista, as the system shouldn't normally freeze just when running an incompatible game.
Last, the Blackthorne comparison is actually comparison of Dosbox (as the emulated game should run identically), but he didn't say which version (later Dosbox releases should work on Vista).
What do you expect from these people, they post anything to try and make their system look better.
As a Linux user, I am not really sure that this is something I want to brag about.
i'm still trying to get Halo to run with Wine.
it's the only reason i have for a windows partition.
IMO, people need to contact the FTC regarding Microsoft and its various deals with Linux companies, especially when claims of increasing interoperability between Windows and Linux is mentioned. Since as far back as the year 2000 when Corel was still working on WINE and Microsoft and Corel had an agreement, where has Microsoft done anything to increase DirectX interoperability with Linux?
If Falcon 4: Allied force, and the other Falcon 4 variants will run satisfactorily under WINE, i'll go back to Linux full time (have run it since 96 in various jobs including desktop, but my home pc is for games), but i'm too much of a flight sim nerd to give up Falcon... :|
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I found the same with many games. Perhaps you could get similar results by really tweaking out NTFS, but I've found that ReiserFS really ran circles around my window default FAT32/NTFS windows config, and XFS was pretty damn good too.
Merits of the OS as a whole aside, the windows world has seen pretty much nothing new except unmaterialized promises in the filesystem arena, whilst 'nix filesystems have experience regular updates and steady growth.
The funny thing is that I found the same thing with XP sometime ago, and that prompted me to investigate gaming on linux (verdict in my case: better for quite a few games, but not playable for all).
The two factors here were stability and speed. In terms of stability, it really came down to drivers, and the windows ones blew. I can only partially blame Microsoft for the bugginess of my Creative soundcard drivers, but they - as well as my wireless drivers - were a hefty source of lockups on my PC. The only reason I feel MS shares the blame for this is that even the so-called "certified" drivers caused lockups.
So, with games freezing regularly on windows, I tried gaming in 'nix and found that at the time, games like Warcraft had greater stability.
Now more up again to some other issues... Battlefield 2 ran really slow, and complained of outdated drivers on my laptop. Unfortunately the generic NVidia driver didn't work for laptops, and the manufacturer didn't really any new ones, so my windows system was stuck with rather pathetic performance. Cue linux again, where the NVidia driver updates still work for my older card, and provided increased functionality+performance, making it run noticeably better in 'nix (especially combined with faster load-times due to a superior filesystem).
So what use do I have for windows? Well, some stuff doesn't run in 'nix yet, and doesn't perform well in a VM, so I still keep a small winXP boot-partition available for those days that I want to run a windows-only game or app. The list of those is shrinking though, and certainly the list of "works-in-XP-but-not-in-Vista" (and works-in-'nix-but-not-in-Vista) may very well lead to Linux becoming not only the dominant, but the only OS on my future machines.
You mean Blizzard made a game before World of Warcraft? Only if selling things on eBay counts as a game.
You can play Battlefield 2 but not on a server that's Punkbuster enabled, which is most of them. At the time you could play Counterstrike Source, but the graphics were DirectX 7 meaning lovely things like solid water. I didn't buy a 7800GT to have 1990 graphics.
So whilst you can play Windows games on Linux, many of the top titles have show stopping issues and non of them look like the Windows versions, usually dropping graphics detail to remain at a playable framerate. You can tell the games which will work better on Linux than Windows by the fact that there's been a Linux port of them such as Quake 3, UT.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
OS/2 had better windows compatibility than windows too...
I completely agree. The first time an application crashes, Windows should pop up a dialog saying 'if this application is designed for an older version of Windows, try selecting it from this list' and then relaunch with compatibility options enabled.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A few things jump right out at me:
1.) He begins the article with a list of reasons that he says Vista sucks. And in my own experience running Vista, every single one of them is not true.
2.) I have never heard of the first 3 games he mentions.
3.) He claims that Civilization 4 hangs his system. But I play Civilization 4 religiously, and I run Vista. In fact, I have NEVER had any trouble getting it to run.
MY conclusion: The user is an idiot who screwed something up on his system and now uses Vista to scapegoat it, as is so popular these days. And of course trash like this gets the front page on slashdot.
For the record: I spend most of my time in Ubuntu 7.10. I'm no Windows fan. But if you're going to hate something, for god's sake, hate it for a GOOD reason, not a stupid reason you made up.
He couldn't even get Civ IV to run? He's an idiot! I run Civ IV, without problems, every day on my 5 year old P4 system with Vista Ultimate.
I agree, but I won't even bother starting a long winded post about this, because it's so obviously wrong.
I'll just say that the title is:
Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista
While the article claims:
What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox.
These tell two completely different stories.
That there are exceptions to the rule that games in general work better on Windows Vista than on Linux.
But that's pretty much it. Hopefully, most here realize this already.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux." Right, on an XP emulator. Well, duh.
Presumably if they were run on a Vista emulator, they'd break.
If they ran on Linux without Wine, then, yes, I'd be impressed.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There are plenty of good reasons. Surely it can't be as easy to set up games in Linux for Windows, as it must be in Windows - the platform for which the games are written - yet, an amazing amount of Vista-users who replied to this article explains how they have to run as admin, change compability modes, and so forth - shouldn't WIndows-games simply run in Windows?
I didn't want to feel left out, so here's my list of games that don't work under Wine. And these aren't some obscure titles either; all are popular games that an average slashdotter loves.
If he did, he wasn't the only one.
I've yet to see anyone here post actual numbers for sales of the gPC.
The rave reviews came from Geeks. Not from the Walmart customer who needed a functional modem, dial-up at $10 a month. Walmart has a lot of customers who fit that profile.
But one thing that is catching on is "anything but Vista"
You'll find the gPC at Walmart.com. The only Linux box that you will find at Walmart.com. But you will also find a full line-up of Vista machines.
--- and a $100 multifunction printer that ships with a Vista driver.
Windows Vista sales have been strongest at the "high" end. Vista Premium and Ultimate.
The $600 Dual Core Acer desktop with 20" widescreen LCD monitor.
Strong enough to help fuel 20% growth in Microsoft's client division in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2008. Microsoft is out-performing the tech sector. It is out-performing Apple. It is out-performing Google.
I get so pissed off at Vista for gaming! I bought a new computer a few months ago, and immeditly installed Linux, and decided to use Windows Vista for gaming. Boy was that a mistake! First, every time I boot the stupid Vista, it would spend hours using up the hard drive "indexing" itself. It's supposed to do this when I'm not using the computer, but sure enough, right in the middle of games of Unreal Tournament III or Counter Strike: Source, the indexing thing would start, crashing every game running because the game can't run with something chewing up the hard drive. Then the graphics card. Stupid Microsoft decided to take out hardware profiles in Vista. One of the drivers for my graphics card is incompatible with a certain game, but only the newest driver can run all the other games. Instead of simply creating a hardware profile, one for 1 game, one for the rest, I have to change it manually, reboot, and repeat the process whenever I need to play the game (luckily this game had a Linux client, which runs much better than the Windows client). And let's not forget Areo, that takes up too much RAM and graphics card power just to run! Seriously, did Microsoft even make Vista for gaming? How do they expect to run DX10 just on Vista if NO ONE CAN GAME ON IT???
Well, that's a good point, but if your mom needed to do that to get a program working, there are pretty clear instructions on how to do so. Vista will typically ask you "did this program run correctly?" and if you answer no, will take those steps for you.
If you gave that right click, select compatibility mode instruction to your mother, I wager she could do it. Not so for getting Wine running.
/. is displaying subjective bias any fundie would be proud of by putting an article like this on the front page. Ironic for a bunch of nerds that get pissy every time anyone ELSE does a statistically invalid study that pisses on something they like.
Not to say I wouldn't like to see Wine wipe the floor with Vista, but I've had 0 compatibility issues with my games collection on my Vista x64 laptop. As usual,
LOL, the original poster doesn't have an nvidia, he's got a "Via C3 Nehemiah", which is most likely on one of Via's EPIA boards, using Via's own video controller.
The C3 doesn't even implement the entire SSE instruction set, so most likely he's hitting a snag there, and needs to have wine and its libraries and the video driver and GL libraries recompiled to a lower-generation cpu without using SSE.
that's a bold statement, saying that linux has better compatibility than vista. and it's definitely false.
If it has to run as admin then it does not fit my definition of windows compatible; it's only windows runnable and to me that's almost the same class as wine runnable where wine would be the more secure.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Ignoring all the falacies and problems of the article posted, the author is basically saying his games are less broken on Wine than Vista. That sounds like a lot of fun. Happy gaming. Although I think he better spend his time learing some basics of how to use Vista to allow his games to run. Good god, he's already received numerous free technical support solutions from discussions here. Have we started Vista tech support now?
From the article: "Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world in a big way?".
Really, it's not funny anymore.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Actually if you read the article, the story should be "Wine crashes the games more nicely". Games that bring vista (display driver) to it's knees just plane chrash on wine. If you need to thinker a lot before gaming, it is not a very good (written) game.
This would be a good reason to port Wine to Vista, runnign under cygwin for example.
While I find this story, and the facts therein, amusing, the same could be said of Leopard and its lack of a Mac OS Classic Environment: Linux with SheepShaver has better Classic Mac OS compatibility than Leopard does out of the box.
But I guess this is not a perfect analogy because SheepShaver can be run on Leopard. Maybe someone will port WINE over to Vista. :-)
:q!
You probably didn't apply the AMD Dual core fixes properly.
Link: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=983781
The article writer basically used the following steps:
... but with tweaks.
1) Try a program in Wine and discover that it doesn't work fully.
2) Try a program in Cedega and discover that it works
3) Try a program in Vista and adjust nothing. Discover it works halfway.
4) Call Vista crap.
5) Get Slashdotted and become a god among Linux fanboys.
Seriously. This article is hardly anything close to a fair comparison of the compatibility with each of these games. I'd personally debunk this using my x64 installation of Vista, but to be honest, I'm not going to waste my time. The previous comments already show how idiotic this guy really is to put forward his conclusion.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
So if you don't have the time, pay someone else to do it - buy preinstalled. Google for "preinstalled linux".
So it'll run Windows apps (some) but just not on your Windows compatible hardware? Please. Novell and Red Hat do recognized critical devices on any of my Dell, Levono, or Alienware notebooks. Getting to choose my OS but having to give up my choice of hardware is unacceptible.
/LabMonkey09
I haven't played a game on my pc since humm.. maybe 1999? I've played all my games on ps2 and now xbox 360 so whatever xbox live is where its at and ps3 network is nowhere close. There's now Games for Windows certification and its obvious these game developers are not getting there games certified so hence not working due to the developers lazyness to make sure it works with vista. Vista has been fine here, no issues, so stop spreading the FUD
Contrary to the posted story I have not and have no intention of running under Vista.
Hi, meet me. I don't know how to do that. I don't know why I should have to do that. Programs should just work. That's why I ditched linux and went with a Mac. I use XP at work because that's what the boss foists upon us. If I had an option, I wouldn't. But the mac just works. That's why I use it.
John
It is from the monthly update. Basically, roughly once a month (sometimes longer though) MS releases an update to DirectX. The update isn't pushed out to clients because it doesn't need to be. It is just user mode DLLs, and it is stuff a lot of games don't use. So, the idea is that if your game makes use of it, you just stick it in the game directory. Many games do that. Some others chose to include the MS installer. Ok that's fine too, though I think not as good an idea since some people get confused and cancel it, thinking they don't need it since they already have DX9/DX10. However sometimes, they forget to include the DLLs. In that case, if your system doesn't have them, it won't run. So what you do it go get the update from Microsoft (dxwebsetup.exe) and it'll go ahead and put on all the DLLs you don't have, no reboot needed since they are just user land stuff.
It is just developers dropping the ball a bit with it. The right answer is just to package any of the DLLs you need in your installer and put them in your program's directory. That way the user doesn't get bothered, and it works just as well.
You can just check for a new version every couple months if you want to help avoid problems. Last one was November of 2007. The latest dev version also includes these, of course, which is why it'll fix it, however there's no need to put all that on your system if you don't want to.
I have used Wine and it does not seem to run most Windows applications very well. It does not seem apt to call it a windows emulator because it still apparently does not support a large number of critical Windows APIs, or else applications would run on it with few problems. It would be nice to ditch windows completely and use Wine to run windows progs, but it is not nearly reliable enough to even consider that. Often I have software for work I have to use that is for Windows. I Would love to run it on Linux but it does not work at all well with wine.
Thanks,
I'll try it out asap.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=284281&cid=20416659
Quote:
"
I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:
- Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
- Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
--- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
- ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
- On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
- NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
-
So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.
So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.
Why do I need Vista again?
"
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
In fact unless you have a very restrictive firewall, there's nothing to prevent normal (non-admin) users running spambots...
Fair enough, but that means the game was just as broken in XP and 2k, as the run-as-admin requirement is not new for Vista. The difference is that the older versions defaulted to always running as admin while Vista doesn't. IMHO, that's a good thing, even if it does expose bad software that was never "windows compatible" in the first place.
When I switched over to Linux a year and a half ago, it was to avoid being a prisoner to Vista.
Now [after years of administering/user Windows], you'd have to pay me [a million dollars] to go back to Windows
A kernel panic means something went wrong in the kernel space. Unless you're running Wine as root, Wine can't do that directly. Even if Wine is triggering the effect due to a bug in Wine, some piece of kernel-level code is allowing it to happen. You described the problem as the system "locking up," not specifically a kernel panic. I've had applications freeze X. Try switching to a console to kill the process. I can't recall ever having a complete lockup under Linux that wasn't hardware or driver (including X config) related.
"Unused" space to store volume shadow copies (Server 2003, "Previous Versions" feature)
Symbolic links (Vista, tricky though not impossible to user-create and not quite as good as in *nix, used to provide backward compatibility regarding folders that have been moved/renamed)
Ability to resize partition while mounted (Vista, though this might just be the partitioning software not the FS itself)
Features it has had for an unknown time:
Hard links
Case-sensitivity (disabled by default, not used for Win32 subsystem)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Usually, when a new version of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or some major Linux distribution reaches stable and is officially released, user are quickly running to get it and install it on their machine. And are usually happily surprised when some specific function that required some hacking on the previous verions (recompiling drivers for some Wifi hardware whose constructor didn't want to help development at all) are suddenly handled in an automated fashion.
Usually, when a new version of Mac OS X gets out, mac users are running to get, or loudly complaining on blogs that they bought and received an older version and had their waited 2 weeks more they'ld have receive the new one pre-installed. And all those users can't wait to test all those excinting features that Jobs touted at the previous expo (and all of which features were indeed present in the software as promised - just for the records)
But every time a new version of Windows gets out, people are loudly complaining that the new version is buggy, complain about some unwanted features that were forcibly pushed onto them (like DRM), complain that the new version basically requires a full hardware update before being remotely compatible, breaks compatibility with old games or basically anything that isn't the MS-Office version du jour, complain that all the cool feature that would actually have mattered were once again removed and postponed to the next version, complain that everything seems slower for no other reason, Microsoft is reporting not-as-big-as-expected sales, every one predicts that this version of the OS is a complete fluke that will finally bring the downfall of Microsoft.
Think again about these. Don't you notice a trend ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I do have an NT machine. Its 4.0 and it was ok. I never bothered to install 2K. I do own it mind you. As for XP - why bother?
:-)
Everything I need to do, my 1998 Linux machine does, and it does it rather well. Recently we had a power failure. There is a 60 amp hour deep cycle Hawker battery behind the UPS and it died! When I rebooted the message was that Linux had been up for 670 days. IMHO this is not bad.
As for your "embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server", I'm looking for one of those.
Any suggestions where I can get one and what to look for?
I'm not a gamer. I'm an investor. I spend a lot of time in the browser doing research. I cannot imagine what life might be like on a windows machine running IE with a single head and probably a bad keyboard.
Me? Dual heads... IBM PC 101 keyboard... Web Servers in the background running OpenBSD. Firewall runs OpenBSD too.
I expect the account numbers and passwords of more than 1/3 of the people who use windows have been harvested. My Broker suggests I should buy windows. The exposure my broker has is unmeasurable. My broker is owned by a rather large Canadian Bank! Oh Boy!
Am I biased? Yes, you bet I am.
Am I in the market for another machine? Maybe. It should be the size of a package of cigarettes (no I don't smoke). It should have at least two (2) nics. I'd like solid state. I'd like edge connectors so that I can live connect another unit to it if I can think of a reason to do so. If it likes 12 volts then this will be perfect because any old deep cycle battery can then power the thing which means I can use it off grid. My Hawker battery cost over $400 bux. This drives a UPS which puts out 120 volts AC which goes into a switching power supply which puts out 5 & 12 volts DC. I think there are some optimizations which can take place here.
My point? Its in the details: the future is smaller and better and re-thought. Linux is part of this.
Why buy a dinosaur? What 40 years ago filled a huge room and what 10 years ago could be toted in the boot of your average car can now be put in a shirt pocket... well not quite. But I'm not going to be buying an empty P.O.S. box which is about 1.5 feet tall and 6 inches wide and over a foot deep with a dinosaur OS when I know what I'm looking for should fit easily into my briefcase.
Take these ideas to the marketing folks.
Oh... marketing folks. HP "lost" Carley. (thank gawd. She didn't look good even with her paint job) HP tried to flog a 33s. HP now has a 35S out. It fits into my shirt pocket.
It does not have 2 nics. Still I think it might be possible to use it as a web server. This is what I'm looking for.
Clearly the dinosaur is not dead yet but I think I see some of the path to the future.
Small and cheap and reliable and flexible. yes - it has to run Linux.
My 2 sense.
It's very improbable that Linux has better compatibility with old Windows programs because Wine also works on Windows ...
Geez... that guy should just shut the fuck up, he is helping nobody with an article full of lies and crap like that. I've seen TOO MANY articles from guys that promote Linux because they love to hate Windows. The big issue with that is that they make us Linux users look like jackasses and liars, cause their articles give false expectations to people that would like to switch.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I've seen games crash on my Vista-based notebook, I've seen them fail to start, but they've never brought down the system.
In fact, I think the only hard-lock or restart I've had on this machine was due to overheating. Vista's been pretty solid, but I think having a dual-core CPU helps quite a bit. (When an app locks up and utilizes 100% of one CPU, my interface is still responsive.)
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
It was also important to me that this box _be_ a PC. It saves a lot of hassle.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I don't own Vista (never will). My experiences have all been horrific with it. I think Vista is essentially another Millenium fiasco. So right now I will tell you I HATE Microsoft. There I said it. I will also propose I have the right since I have been on it since I was a child and program on it, provide technical support, consulting, etc. So I speak from my own experience here and I don't think biased is the right word, since I have been pushing, fixing, and providing maintenance for their shitty operating systems all my life. For the record though, Win2K FTW.
That being said, as far as the compatibility goes, I think the biggest problem is how this guy may be running it. Vista is unique in how many ways you can run a program. From permissions, to compatibilities, etc. So Vista might in fact do better with some of the games if was properly setup. Wine is good and all, but I think it is a stretch to say it runs better then Vista for games.
"Out of the box" compatibility is not Vista's strongest feature, especially when running 64-bit and using programs that were written for Win2K. So I cannot really fault them on that completely. I also think that backwards compatibility as part of their paradigm is a big problem. With the processing power we have now and virtualization getting as good as it has... I say SCRAP backwards compatibility all together.
Microsoft is certainly not all at fault here either. The developers need to take some well deserved heat. There is a big difference in relying on backwards compatibility and stating it is Vista compatible AND ACTUALLY BEING COMPATIBLE. I can't begin to list how many companies fall under this. It's been a long time and there are still no patches for some of the programs my clients run and they are crashing on a daily basis. It's like driving a beat up POS car on the road and having it die and sputter out every couple of intersections. Freakishly frustrating and I don't have an answer for them, at least not one that they like.
I also hold Microsoft up to absolute contempt to burn in the fiery pits of hell for how they handle licensing. I believe they have intentionally made it difficult to maintain licenses across hardware changes, and I further think congress (or some other appropriate government body) should look into how computers are purchased and FORCE Microsoft to give refunds when customers already have licenses. I have educated all my clients/friends/enemies/strangers about how that little sticker is worth 150$+. Cut the bastard off and keep it in a filing cabinet. I maintain lists of all my keys AND my client's keys. I have re-used them when building new machines already as my clients are perfectly entitled to it.
So the licenses are such a big deal since just about EVERYBODY who buys a new Vista system is actually properly licensed to run a virtualization of Win2K/XP on Vista. This is why I say scrap backwards compatibility in favor of running virtual instances for older games. I think virtualization will only get better and you will be able to do more with it.
Getting rid of backwards compatibility really lets us go forward with OS design. Let's just start from scratch for once.
"Clearly biased?" How about clearly dumbass.... 1st of all, let's set aside some things. This guy's "test" machine is a laughable 5+ year old dinosaur...If I put Vista on a 5 year old machine, of course things aren't going to work well/at all. Hell, putting Vista on a 5 hour old machine that just came off the fab plant and you're going to get mixed results. Some of his game choices are suspect. Soldat? I can't find anywhere where it says that it will run under Vista anyway - lots of mention of DirectX 8.1 which is, what, 2004? era DirectX so never compatible with native Vista anyway, it appears...Don't see anything regarding "Compatibility Mode" testing which is what Microsoft codes into everything to give some level of Backward Compatibility. Civ IV: Yet another game that came out before Vista did. I have the Steam Version which is just fine under VistUlt32- slow, but it works. Might have something to do with his POS he's testing it on. DOSBOX game testing? C'mon...DOS level games....? If he really wants to get close, find some games that he doesn't cherry pick that were designed 2 years or more before Vista hit the street...How well does say, HL2 run on it? or HL1? I'm all for bashing Microsoft - Hell, I'm an IT Manager in a Wintel Shop, and bashing where MS screws up is fine by me. This article was just flaimbaitious(tm) crap. I'm sending the author a bill for my time....
Check out Opus. They're big in the auto-PC crowd. http://www.opussolutions.com/index.php?p=products&id=4
Ugh, it's worse than that, the chump didn't even bother patching the games or anything... nobody runs unpatched Civ IV (apart from this guy...)
I notice he didn't try running Crysis, Half-Life 2, Bioshock etc etc. Maybe he's not aware of them? Or maybe they'd knife his crummy headline-for-page-hits? What a hack!
Well, let me pick 4 really bad examples tested in such a bad way to absolutely show my results the way I want you to see them, and I'll be able to persuade the public into believing anything!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I've been playing the Orange Box (Half life 2, TF2 Portal) quite happily on ubuntu with Wine.
Sure, you probably want to check online and see if anyone else has had success and/or failure getting it to work before you go out and drop your cash on the game, but when all is well, all is well.
The games look identical on both OS's (Vista/Ubuntu) too, I have tested this.
If you de-install every problem software and take some of the advice above and run the setup and program as administrator most all your "bugs" and "problems" will go away. Vista is locked down you look like a user with admin rights but your not. If you user name is not "Administrator" then you have less then admin rights no matter what group your user account belongs too. You won't realize it's a rights issue. Because your program is trying to do something it is not allowed to do and Windows nor the authors of the application were ready for it to do that. Right click on the setup.exe of the application Run as Admin. When you get a shortcut to run the program go in and give it admin rights by right clicking the short cut and adjusting it's properties. IF that doesn't solve all of your problems start trying the compatibility modes. I don't think Vista is a problem as much as no one knows how to use it properly.
I call bullshit on this post.
Good news for your mother! Just right-click on the shortcut and choose properties. Then click the "Find Target" button. It's that easy.
This is very informative. Thanks!
Check the Fortune 100 firms.
Several of them use Linux in the desktop right now for specialized functions (hundreds of them).
And that is just the tip of the iceberg, techies in many of these companies are pushing hard to get Linux (and OSX) desktops instead of Windows, at least for technical power users (which in some firms is a lot of people).
There will be no year of Linux on the Desktop, there will be an incremental growth and it will happen without most people noticing, it should also be noticed that maybe Linux adoption may bypass desktop adoption altogether by becoming the dominant player in the mobile market (PDAs, phones, media players, etc) which may be the market of the future.
The point that needs to be made is that now you can suggest Linux to the suits and they are listening and considering a viable option in many cases.
Thinking about my first Linux Desktop almost 12 years ago (literally smuggled in my office), that is what I call progress.
The machine does not have any obvious means to install anything but what is in Xandros repositories.
And anybody selling it will make it patently clear that the machine doe snot run those programs, this of course it the completely different GUI is not a big enough giveaway....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know it is a novel idea for many parents, but what about telling them that they can play only Linux games and that is the end of it?
/. seem to be under the tyranny of their own children. It seems like parenting is a forgotten black art ...
Honestly, many folks in
IANAL but write like a drunk one.