Apps That Officially Support Wine

David Gerard writes "Wine (the Windows not-an-emulator for Unix) runs Windows applications more often than not. (Certainly more often than Vista does.) Dan Kegel on the wine-users mailing list/forum has started gathering apps that declare Wine a supported platform. And there's now a Wine Support Honor Roll page on the Wine wiki. We need more apps that work with Wine stating that they consider it a supported platform. If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"

Comments

Question

[MyLongNickName]

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience? And consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality".... so I figure an even less percentage sales increase.

(ducks and covers)

Re:Question

[SanityInAnarchy]

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience?

Developers who find actual numbers, instead of pulling them out of their ass.

And that means doing a little market research. The market for your app may be biased one way or the other. For instance, if you're selling a text editor targeted at programmers -- or better yet, an SCM -- it's probably not too difficult to port, and you'll probably get quite a few grateful Linux users.

consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality"....

Can we get past this already? It seems the only Linux folk who have that mentality are complete strawmen created by people who've never actually met a Linux user.

I actually bought Windows XP, despite Linux being my primary OS. Most Windows users I know will pirate it if it didn't come with the machine.

There is one exception to that rule: On Windows, there are tons of little freeware (but closed source) utilities like IrfanView, WinRAR, etc. On Windows, and to a larger extent, OS X, there's even more -- a massive culture of shareware, where tiny cataloging utilities and file management utilities are selling for $10 to $20 each.

So, if your app is something truly useful, sure. I would love to see things like Photoshop support Wine officially (I'll use Gimp when I can, but it still hasn't caught up), and I love that WoW releases Wine-specific patches, and Eve uses Winelib.

But if you're trying to sell me a $15 version of diff or merge, it had better iron my socks, too.

Re:Inaccurate?

[theheadlessrabbit]

from the perspective of a computer user (my sig should confirm that I am not a developer) perhaps this is because people expect windows apps to work in the windows world because, "we paid good money for this, it had better work"
while in the linux world, if an app doesn't work, i am not all that bothered by it, because its free, i paid nothing for it, i will forgive the occasional bug, and if it gets bad enough, there is an alternative out there that is also free.

In wine, having an app that was intended for an entirely different operating system actually work just blows my mind. i would never think to complain to the wine team that "x program won't work"

in windows, when an app fails, it is frustrating because I expect commercial software to be bug free.

(note to linux zealots: please don't mod this flamebait, did you notice how i said "IF a linux app fails" and "WHEN a windows app fails")

Re:Inaccurate?

[SleepingWaterBear]

Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.

I'm not so sure he's overestimating! Given how many years Windows XP and Windows 98 were aroung for, it's a safe bet that there are hundreds of times more apps for those two platforms than for Vista. A rather large fraction of those work in Wine. If a decent fraction of them don't work in Vista (and my understanding is that they don't), then just by number of apps Wine probably runs a lot more windows apps than Vista does.

Of course, the vast majority of the apps Wine runs that Vista doesn't are outdated, or have been replaced by newer version that do run in Vista, but for sheer numbers, I think it's a safe bet that Wine wins!

Re:Inaccurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

/. needs a healthy does of text book logic lessons. Categorical statements such as this not only remove any credibility from the article, they set a tone on /. that encourages more such statements, and so on. This sort of sophomoric drivel in the comments is to be expected, but it has no place in the submissions (at least not those which get green-lighted).