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Ask Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard About the Future of WINE
Last week, after 15 years of development, tempered by the need for arduous reverse engineering, the WINE project released version 1.0. What "1.0" means for WINE is neither that the project is finished, nor that it is perfect, but rather that the software runs a small subset of specific freely downloadable Windows applications. That's not to say it doesn't run scads of others, too -- the apps database is proof that thousands of programs run to at least some degree. Here's your chance to ask WINE developer Jeremy White and WINE project lead Alexandre Julliard (both of Codeweavers) about the future of WINE, or any other questions about the project that cross your mind. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply; please ask as many questions as you'd like, but limit yourself to one question per post. We'll pass on the best questions to Jeremy and Alexandre for their answers.
I hear people often say that its important for Wine to be able to run major applications like Office and Photoshop. However, from a migrate to Linux point, I think the thing that holds people up the most is the small propreitary applications that are written for a specific function. Is there going to be any focus on those programs in the future? Disclaimer, I realize that there are tens of thousands of such apps, but maybe many have something in common.
I think the question that is most pressing on our minds (and the one that will determine the magnitude of the pigs flying) is, "Will we be able to run Duke Nukem Forever on Wine 1.0 in the Year of the Linux Desktop?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1.0 is used to mark the API as being stable: it is now safe to build your Windows' program's source code against the wine headers without having to worry about them changing in the future.
That a few of the important Windows applications work was a side goal: the wine developers merely thought that it would be fitting, given the apparent significance of the 1.0 release name, to perfect support for what they can.
Perhaps you're thinking of wine the wrong way. It is, first and foremost, a windows-compatible API for porting applications to posix.
If in 10 years the dominant platform is Linux, or OS X, where does that leave WINE?
Vinegar?Has anyone from WINE engaged apple to see about getting wine better ported and available to OSX users? I am currently using parallels to support my win32 needs under OSX, but that is all. I do not like the idea of having to pay FRP for a full windows OS when all I want to do is run win32 apps. I think it would be awesome to see WINE shipping directly in 10.7, with support from apple.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Wine was a great idea in its day but now with multi-core CPUs and excellent VMs (VMWare, VirtualBox, etc.) do you still see the need for Wine?
Question:
With Vista stumbling terribly and now XP being removed from the marketplace, in the medium term do you see Wine / Linux as a true potential commercial viable alternative rather than just a niche as it is now? If so, what financial steps have you taken to prepare for legal threats?
Thanks!! :)
I can answer this one. WINE will still be around and used, because the (by then) 30 years worth of Windows software development will include applications still around and being used.
Also, using 10 years as the endpoint for Windows dominance doesn't address what happens between then and now. It's going to have to be gradual, and as development shifts to a different platform, I guarantee some developers will be tweak their code to run in either Windows or WINE, or use Winelibs to shoehorn most of their application onto OSX and Linux.
About where Dosbox is today I reckon.
How does your usual reverse engineering work flow look like? (How do you start, short note on tools, do you use (unit) tests)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
With virtual machines becoming ever easier to install and use, maintaining a Windows VM on my Linux desktop substantially reduces my need for Wine. Will Wine become an afterthought in another ten years as we move to desktops running multiple operating systems simultaneously?
What pieces of software that aren't working do you think are the most important to get working next? Have there been any programs that you never expected to have so many people request?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Will the WINE project try to implement the Windows Vista APIs or will the project aim only for the Windows XP APIs? Seeing that Windows Vista didn't catch on and a lot of applications are still written for Windows XP. Maybe it is a good time to iron out the DirectX 9 and Windows XP DLLs.
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
When I first started using GNU/Linux in 1999, I knew that if I wanted to run Windows apps, the best way to go about it was to dual-boot. Now, it appears that the most convenient way to run Windows apps is to run Windows in a virtual machine. Since both dual-booting and virtualization appear to be more convenient ways to run Windows apps than WINE, where does WINE fit in?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Hi,
Suppose that the APIs delivered with Windows XP are the 100% baseline for app compatibility that you want to achieve. Could you give an estimate of how much percent is already implemented and how much work it would be to implement the rest?
Thanks!
I would like to ask what your plans are to improve the process of/increase the number of people contributing to Wine? Do you plan to provide more feedback on patches (they are often ignored without comment), for example? Do you see Alexandre ever trusting other devs enough to take over subsystems/individual dlls?
Wine seems to making large improvements on ease of use in Linux desktops, especially with the simple installation afforded by package managers. However, installation of Wine on Mac OS X remains complicated.
Are there any efforts underway to simplify the use and installation of Wine on Mac OS X?
What is the biggest obstacle in getting 100% Win32 API compatibility? Is it undocumented "features"? Inaccurate documentation from Microsoft? Fundamental differences between "Windows" and "Linux"? Other technical limitations?
Wine today runs fine, but as desktop linux visuals become better with nice themes, wine becomes more and more an alien in your computer. Is this any plan to make it more native in the look & feel?
What plans do you have for better multi-threading support?
Whenever someone runs a program in Wine, it is because there is demand for that specific Windows application on Linux. Should end users be encouraged to write to software developers and request Linux or Wine-compatible software?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I've never used wine to run windows programs. However, I have used the source code as a form of documentation/verification while doing win32 programming. How do you feel about that?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I've been using Wine for a long time and its ability to run applications such as Framemaker, Photoshop, uTorrent and some other useful abandonware (Delrina Perform, anyone?) has improved my productivity significantly. Thanks for your hard work... and yes, I sent money!
I see Wine as the only serious option for rapid cross-platform development (Linux/OS X/Windows).
Now that the API is stable(r), is this how you'd like to see Wine evolve?
I'm excited to see Wine working in OS X on the Intel Macs. I have however run into problems in this configuration that I don't see with the same applications using Wine on Linux.
What are the challenges for Wine on OS X/Intel?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I tried Wine and it worked terribly.
Exactly. It's a Windows emulator.(no, it's not, but for the purpose of the joke...)
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
With you working for codeweavers (which produces the excellent Crossover Linux package), do you see a conflict of interest in wine not directly supporting MSOffice 2K at the gold level?
As a related question:
How do you decide which portions of the code you write goes to wine and which are crossover-specific?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
OpenGL games work very fast. It's typically only games that have Direct3D that are screwed up, and that is another whole morass on top of WINE proper.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
No, that's a VNC client.
http://www.mhall119.com
Microsoft doesn't have any grounds for suing. The codebase was written from scratch (so no copyright issues), and if Wine infringes on Microsoft patents, then so does OS X, Linux, BSD, etc. Would you say that all of those are wasted projects, since they are going to be sued and shutdown?
Also, even if Wine suddenly disappeared tomorrow, it still would not have been a waste. It has taken 15 years for Wine to get to where it is now, but it was being actively used during those 15 years. Tens of thousands of people have been successfully using Wine to get their work done for over a decade. That's a success right there. Moreover, the developers no doubt have found Wine very useful over the years... hence why they continued working on it.
If Wine is a "waste", then so is every long-term software project.
So, what are your plans for Wine 2.0?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Throughout all your adventures with the Win32 API, what would you say is the most brilliant part of the system, and which is the most horrible? Like, for which systems would you say, "Wow! I wish I had come up with that!" or "Dear GOD NO!"
A while ago when I was reading into Wine I found information on Winelib. Are you still actively promoting the use of Winelib for developers interested on an easy cross platform solution? If not, what are your thoughts on people developing cross platform applications with Windows as the primary interest?
And Amazon has it for a cheap $150 (used)! http://www.amazon.com/Meiers-Alpha-Centauri-Planetary-Linux/dp/B00004TBBX/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1214510827&sr=1-14 (Tuxgames is sold out as usual.)
I know making certain key applications work in time for the 1.0 milestone was one of the WINE team's goals, but I just wanted to thank the team, on behalf of everyone in the /. crowd, for making sure Notepad.exe was one of them. It was the first Windows program I tried to use under WINE and it performed flawlessly, making me feel a little more at home on Linux.
We Linux users have been putting up with the likes of vim and Kate and gedit for years, but all of these editors come with major caveats, such as multiple levels of undo and the ability to read both UNIX and DOS text files. With WINE I've been able to use Notepad to delete entire lines when I really mean to delete only one word, and get little square characters where carriage returns should be. I'm so pleased by this app that I'll probably move on to trying Paint.exe next (the silly GIMP airbrush tool isn't as satisfyingly pixellated as the one MS Paint perfected way back in 1995).
Keep up the good work in bringing the Redmond's best software to the Linux desktop!
Most desktop machines today are capable of 64-bit support. When will we see WINE running 64-bit Windows apps? Wikipedia says that this was to be considered after the 1.0 release. Well, 1.0 has been released, so can we expect to see 64-bit support in the future?
Per the FAQ, it'll leave Wine as the best way to run twenty years of Windows crapware. It's about the apps, not the platform.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I've loaded WINE numerous times over the past years - primarily to play 'legacy' video games/simulations. I've had limited success with the specific stable of games I am interested in and own. I've also paid for Cedega which was equally dissatisfying. With the demise of Loki Software, and the limited titles that have been ported directly to linux by icculus.org and LGP to date - there is still a very large sector of games that many would say hold back adoption of linux as a gaming platform.
What are your views on WINE gaming, and what are you doing (if anything) to address this issue?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
This is something they're specifically working their arses off to achieve, particularly the Wine contributors at Google.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
How much do the Wine and ReactOS teams contribute to each other's projects? What are your personal takes on ReactOS? Do you think it can become a serious Windows replacement?
Stupid flounders!
Any plans to implement DX10?
Or at least make DX9 games (like HL2EP2) work decently.
Will WINE or Codeweavers make a commitment to fully support a recent vintage of MS-Office (2007, 2003, XP) as a platinum app? By "fully", I mean everything in the suite--including Access, Outlook, Publisher, the little helper apps, VBA, clipart, etc. When I look at WINE's appdb, I see no consistency to the ratings people give to recent versions of MS-Office, which means users are having varying degrees of problems. Unfortunately, for many people (myself included), MS-Office doesn't work with WINE... Why not assign a group of coders & testers the task of getting 100% of the functionality of this one extremely popular app working???
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Wine was started before the rise in popularity of FOSS and Virtualization. If Wine did not already exist and someone pitched the idea of Wine to you would you: A) Tell them that it'd be better to promote FOSS software that can be ported to other OSes. B) Tell them to just use a virtualization product. C) Start Wine. Would you do it even if you thought FOSS would become more common than closed source applications in the future?
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
"If it were, we'd have already seen a version of WINDOWS that ran all Windows apps without any fancy configuration."
fixed it.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Had a native port. It's not really available in any practical sense.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sure, but not right now.
Please place it in a vacuum-sealed bag and FedEx it to me along with a prepaid return-ship label.
I'll have it sucked, re vacuum-packed, and shipped back to you just as soon as I possibly can.
But only on the HURD version of WINE.
If in 10 years the dominant platform is Linux, or OS X, where does that leave WINE?
Vinegar?Don't we already have enough sour grapes here?
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful
Does WINE have any plans regarding the .NET platform? I know that Mono provides a lot of support for .NET applications, but most professional applications require the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed.
Premise:
I was a very hopeful wine user, and even tried to contribute
some small improvements to the project that never went anywhere
(support for the undocumented INI empty section and empty keyname
features of the profile kernel32 API), partly since I had
no real windows to test on, partly since I could not establish
a good dialog with the developers, partly because the applications
using this undocumented behavior are not the big known apps.
Question:
Currently wine strategy seems to be (correct me if I am wrong),
to target one application at a time, privileging the big known
apps, with less interest in supporting the smaller apps,
or in breaking them with new versions:
is there any chance that after getting most of the big apps
working, the current strategy will be changed to focus on a
more generic solution, matching the win32 API as closely as
possible, in order to support most if not all of the small
programs, and thus enabling much more migrations to free
software-only solutions and thus achieving world domination?
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html)
Thank you -
Given that XP is at the end of life, I think Wine has an important role in keeping legacy software alive. One such app is Macromedia Freehand. This vector drawing program still has a dedicated following, even though it hasn't seen an update since Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005.
As far as I can tell there is no way to open Freehand documents in Linux. XP will not be available for much longer, and Freehand MX is not Vista compatible. There are a lot of graphic artists with a lot of data still in Freehand format, and they're going to need to access their art on modern operating systems.
Freehand almost works on Wine 1.0. It requires a dll download to run, then it works pretty well, except that the 'more fonts' menu doesn't work. It's 99% there. So my question is, is there going to be a push to get important legacy apps like Freehand 100% perfect? Or is the focus going to continue to be modern windows apps?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
First of all, I'm not a hardcore gamer. I do play Diablo II with Wine, and play the native NWN game on Linux - and surprisingly, the former works better.
Even though I haven't been following the Wine project eagerly, I see it as my best way out of Windows because of games (I have pretty much everything else covered by Linux).
Hence my question: I guess you have had your share of requests to port Direct* APIs to whatever platform Wine supports today. How hard has it been? Would you say that Direct* _is_ a better all-rounded API for games than what is available on the platforms that Wine runs on today?
Who said anything about Cider? That's a Mac-specific proprietary port of WineLib, the product under discussion. The market for Cider is much smaller than the overall market for WineLib, so saying that Cider isn't that popular really doesn't say anything about WineLib. It could be that the free WineLib is good enough that very few people porting apps off Windows need to bother with Cider. Or that people using WineLib to port stuff want to end up with Linux versions, too.
Yeah, you can use traces to show when it's trying to access a particular DLL.
You should probably stop by the forum with app-specific questions, devs there will suggest how to give enough info for a usable bug report.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Do you have any idea how difficult that would be? Emulating Windows down to the last undocumented quirk
Wine Is Not an Emulator
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
how fortunate for you ;)
I know about usb-storage support, it works perfectly, but what about full USB support?
Many USB devices require Windows apps to use them correctly. For me, Line6 USB products for audio come to mind, but i'm sure there are plenty of others.
From what I've seen in the wine-devel discussions, it looks like a tough challenge. Are there any takers yet? What are the main showstoppers? Or, am I totally wrong on my figures and these other USB devices are not used that much?
If these are a lot of questions, please stick to the first one :)
WINE shouldn't really release like a label or logo for games of some type that would allow buyers of some games to know that said game would play on an alternative platform than windows like Linux with WINE of course. that way it could help get the word out to regular people that yes many of the applications that you pay hundreds of dollars for can run on an open platform. you could do it through the website and the developers of other applications and games could include links to their apps being supported and links to bug fixes and stuff.
familiarity > sanity.
Just ask 98% of the PC-using public.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Hi,
Many thanks to wine developers for providing such an application. I would like to ask a few questions.
1. Is windows API exhaustively documented by MS? If yes, why is wine lagging behind so much? If no, why is nobody suing MS?
2. Among all windows apps on earth, what is the approximate percentage of windows apps that use undocumented hooks/syscalls/apis in MS Windows?
My best wishes.
Wine is just an API computability layer, whilst DOSbox is an actual emulator which emulates the actual CPU.
If you want to see how cross-architecture Wine is it can run on PPC Macs using Qemu: http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/QemuWork
Unicode in Slashdot
Hm... I'll bite!
Over the past few years we've seen major architectural concerns calm down. The DLL separation took a while, we had the major filesystem rewrite, and then in the past year we had the big windowing changes. Oh, and then throw in the big changes to support copy protection, real services, and oodles of D3D updates.
So where does that leave us? Are there any major architectural changes in the pipe? There are rumors Codeweavers will integrate a DIB engine - what does that do and why is that necessary? What about in the RPC world? Jeremy - you've battled with audio, how do you feel Wine is doing with regards to audio support?
----- obSig
Number of people ask what percent along are you.
Looking at where you are now, and what it's taken to get there... can you give an estimate of MAN hrs to get to a number of MILE stones you might pick..
win 3.1, win 95,win 98, win 98se, 2k, XP. .net versions
server versions
Vista?
direct x versions
(no i didn't miss ME is there anything that "requires it?")
I would think it's understood that one can't give 100% accurate numbers but i think it might be of value to everyone involved to have an estimated times for some target goals.
And thank you for your time and all the hard work you have put in to this.
"For all we know..." ...first world countries will have reigned in their wanton wastefulness, everyone in the third world will not have want for food, shelter and medical care, media companies will decide that honest content delivery is more important than political statements and profit so will stop the practice of campaign contributions as well as ditch DRM, net neutrality will be enshrined in law and it will be discovered that Santa Claus does, in fact, exist.
I hate printers.
[If] when WINE reaches a satisfactory point of development, do you plan on marketing WINE in similar fashion to the "Games For Windows" campaign? How do you plan on getting WINE out there into mainstream as a big "name"?
Lots of Windows applications run on Wine. However, on Wine the application called ".NET framework" can't be installed and you need to use Mono instead. Since .NET is software that runs on Windows, what stops it from running on Wine? If there wouldn't be technical problems, would Wine have been made to support running the .NET framework, or is there another, non-technical reason why you need to use Mono instead?
The way I look at the crossover vs. wine distinction is: wine is 100% pure "do it right" source code, and crossover is wine plus some code that doesn't meet that standard yet, but does make Office (and other supported apps) run well. (See http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source/ for the hacks in question.)
So really Wine is where the action is for developers, and Crossover is what end users who need Office to run well should run. The only reason Wine doesn't run Office well yet is that nobody's figured out how to do it right yet, and the temporary bandaids that do it wrong but work for now are in Crossover. If you figure out a clean replacement for any of the crossover hacks, they'll gladly commit them into the Wine tree.
In other words, from what I can see, Codeweavers' heart and actions are 100% where they should be from a free software point of view. All apps are permitted to run under Wine. None are reserved for CX.
Does that help?
(Disclaimer: I'm a big Codeweavers customer, occasional Wine contributor, and release manager for wine 1.0.)
One thing I wonder about future development (besides the obvious "what's planned for WINE 2.0?"):
There are lots of tweaks and dependencies that have to be taken into account when installing Windows applications in WINE. There have been some attempts to address this issue in WINE-Doors, Winetricks, and Crossover, but I can't detect any systematic approach to handling this issue in WINE itself.
Are there any plans to simplify this process? Have you considered looking to package managers (e.g. apt) to take care of listing out dependencies, downloading/installing them, etc., at least for things that are available online?
Because it would be great, IMO, if I could do something like set up an additional APT repository and type something like "apt-get install ie6-wine" and have it all taken care of for me.
I'm sure that's a lot to ask, but are there currently any plans in the same vein?