Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64

G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."

Comments

Who really uses it though ?

[billcopc]

Every time I read about Wine, I shrug and/or roll my eyes. I've tried many times to use it, but it simply does not work for the handful of Windows apps I actually need. I gave it another try just a few months ago, and I was again left high and dry, so I turned yet again to virtual machines. At this point, I have stopped caring about the project.

For the inevitable flamers among you, here's the short list of Windows apps I need, that Wine fails to support:

- Photoshop CS3
- Office 2007
- MSIE 6/7

IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom. And don't try to tell me to use The Gimp and OO.o, I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use. If it were just me in my little bubble, I'd be quite happy with unbranded alternatives, but my rent doesn't pay itself.

Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.