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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."
"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.
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.
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();
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.
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 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
Windows XP came out in August of 2001, it is only 6 and a half years old.
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.
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.
I agree! I'm really surprised that this guy couldn't get these games to work, because every small issue i've had with software in vista (which is pretty rare, though more common than XP obviously), i just fiddle with compatibility mode or admin mode, and i can make it work. Sure, it's not always intuitive (if you normally click on a shortcut to open a program, you'll have to find the actual .exe to change compatibility settings... a task i know my mother could never do), but it's really not that big of a deal... Vista problems? WTF?
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Well, actually. you can.
Microsoft bought VirtualPC from Connectix(?) a few years back; they now give it away. So just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I just popped up a DOS 6.22 window with Masters of Magic, a Win98SE window with Starcraft, and for giggles a Debian window running Americas Army. All run fine, simultaneously.
Of course, this is on Win2k. and Americas Army didn't have a great frame rate. but thats probably because the machine only has 1gb of ram and a Geforce4 MX 4000 card.
It also works on XP. I've had my XP-MCE Core Duo / Nvidia 7300 Laptop running 6 simultaneous "Alien Armageddon" games.
Vista....wouldn't even think about trying it.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When spyware started coming out people didn't didn't know about it to much. So they were under the impression the more software installed the better, still thinking like in the DOS days that software doesn't run in the background until you really want to use it. But then spyware was still relatively rare most people were using dial-up so making spyware wasn't effective it slowed down the internet connection enough to be noticed, also during the time Microsoft felt the need to Compete with Sun Microsystems Java Platform by making activeX, Which is faster then Java but without any security everything just ran natively in Windows, people and developers back then still haven't fully understood the advantage of making system independent code, started to use ActiveX for their stuff. Because a bunch of sites now require activeX to be installed everyone just went yea install without reading. Then further on hacks have been found to do without asking for permission. It was a gradual processes and people who have a life besides computers let it slip until it was too late.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
that's a bold statement, saying that linux has better compatibility than vista. and it's definitely false.
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!!
In fact, let's just put this whole story to bed now.
Darwinia on Vista x64.
Soldat on Vista x64.
Civilization 4 on Vista x64.
Blackthorne on Vista x64 in DOSBox.
TFA is verifiably false, and the title is misleading.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I am *certainly* not qualified to comment -- I have never used Vista.
But, I am interested in one thing; what criteria do you use when selecting an OS? That I am curious about.
1 - It just came installed
2 - I have an investment in applications
3 - I evaluated it (on performance/cost/other factors)
4 - I trust the vendor
5 - It is the platform needed for a desired application
6 - It is the platform I suspect I need for a future application
or some other reason?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061