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Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the wine-keeps-getting-better-with-age dept.

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."

8 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Everyone keeps saying... by Smordnys+s'regrepsA · · Score: 5, Interesting

    -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.
    1. Re:Everyone keeps saying... by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide). It has been year of the Linux desktop for 10 years now over here. Yes, it is true, I have never booted Windows box in that period and do not miss a thing except the annoyance. Registration key? Feh.

      At the moment I am running on one of these, Ubuntu, everything just worked when I turned it on including sound, Youtube, several different browsers including firefox 3. Runs KDE like a champ, very smooth. While I type, KDE 4 is installing. Not bad for an embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server and just thought I'd try running KDE on it for fun, which turned out to work really well.

      Oh right, time to install openoffice too, you never know when you might need that on a server :-)
      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    2. Re:Everyone keeps saying... by ricegf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.

      Y'know, the odd thing is that I have.

      For instance, we hosted several young British missionaries (these were religious missionaries, mind you, not Linux missionaries ;-) at our house last summer (I'm in North America), and they all had laptops (nat'chully). To my surprise, one of them was running Ubuntu. I asked him why he chose Ubuntu over Windows, and he replied with admirable British conciseness, "It doesn't crash so much."

      I've run across several others in my church who were using Ubuntu when I met them (and that one Suse guy ;-). Yes, it's a big church, but it's a church, not an engineering conference or engineering club. Nor is it a high-tech firm such as where I work, where Linux is a rather commonplace choice, even for the spouses.

      I'm no longer surprised to meet "normals" using Linux. I'm more surprised nowadays to find someone like you who hasn't. :-)

  2. Re:Cant even start wine by Seven001 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On my computer, WoW runs better under Wine in Linux than on Windows XP. Faster load times and such. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but I have heard quite a few others say the same.

  3. How will emulators etc. deal with Vista? by DigitAl56K · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. WoW on Linux by krischik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  5. Re:hardly a good test by mrwolf007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually the test was pretty good.
    The test was designed to test Vista`s compatibility, so the choice of games wasnt bad.
    It included an old DOS-title, several Indie games (not optimized for Vista, but made for XP) and pretty recent well known game (CIV 4).
    Im also pretty sure that DOS-compatibility is at least equal on linux as compared to Vista, based on my own experience.
    I dont know about the coding quality of the indie games but i guess point is, Vista is not compatible to XP. Ok who would have guessed that?
    And to find out that even a recent game such as CIV4 doesnt work without the latest patches and fiddling around, well talk about compatibility.

  6. Filesystem by phorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.