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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!"
While it is a smaller audience, it's a much more valuable one.
When Joe Sixpack needs computer advice, he comes to us. Getting on our good side with things like this can garner far more benefit than just our direct increase in audience.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
...because it's always a work in progress. We in the Linux world appear to always be "chasing" a prize that can never be caught.
I applaud the programmers in this effort though.
They'll be serving snow cones in hell before Adobe releases Photoshop for Linux. Adobe wants $$$$$ for its products. Linux users, by and large, want their OS and apps for free. The two concepts don't mesh well, and the suits at Adobe know that.
I thought one of the premises of Slashdot is that it is unbiased when your news isn't. This kind of shit would be tolerable on Fox News, hopefully it never will be here.
Well, it's a kdawson post. He will post anything that sounds even a little bit sensationalist or bashes something that "true nerds" hate. Nobody knows why he is still /. staff.
Sorry, the number of users works the other way. As an app maker, I can guarantee you that I've received more complaints that my app doesn't work in Vista than complaints that my app doesn't work in Wine.
And it's a David Gerard article - the guy is a professional Internet troll (responsible for such classy internet sites as lemonparty.org, yourmom.org, and k-k-k.com - don't visit), and part time Wikipedia admin/Wikimedia UK spokesperson (where his favorite pastimes are blocking entire US states for being sockpuppets of banned user, and so forth, this makes an amusing read). Why am I unsurprised?
I was at the credit union today waiting literally hours for a banker-type person to do their job. On the table, a CU industry magazine. I picked it up and started flipping through it. (Interesting how every article followed the same exact business-like structure and format, no matter what the topic.) One of the ads was for some kind of "check transport" device. The thing that zips your check through a U-turn and puts a timestamp or something on it, I think. At the bottom of the ad in big bold letters was the statement:
I was floored. I got that same feeling as the first few times I started seeing World Wide Web URLs pop up on billboards and on TV commercials. Or when random people would find out I was a computer nerd and ask if I knew that Linux program (pronounced with a long 'I').
Put simply, these things teach me that just as there was not really a definitive "year of the Internet," there won't be a "year of Linux" either.Linux's growth has and always will be slow but steady. The nature of software and the I.T. marketplace will demand that more and more software be portable, available, and just generally flexible. That software which isn't will be replaced by that which is. These are a few of the cornerstones of open source after all, and the proprietary vendors would do themselves a favor to realize this for themselves.
Complaining in the F/OSS world = getting the problem FIXED.
i would absolutely love to believe that was the case, but I am forced to read slashdot in windows, because my wifi wont work in ubuntu, even with ndis wrapper. the reply i got was 'use ndis wrapper'
in the F/OSS world, my experience has been people who either mis-understand the problem, or ridicule me for not knowing how to code a solution myself, then they wonder why F/OSS doens't take off like it should.
-I only code in BASIC.-
It's worse than that. Many of the programs on the "platinum" list, which as you noted are supposed to "work flawlessly, no configuration" - don't. If you look at the write-ups people posted saying they tried it and it worked flawlessly, most of them will say they "didn't try" certain features (which are probably the ones you want, and which end up not working) or they even say that there ARE some problems... and in many cases these are serious problems.
But the program starts up, and it's feasible you could get something useful out of it, so it's "platinum" right? Chances are, those couple of things that weren't tried or didn't work quite right are the whole reason anyone wants to use the software in the first place, as in your Starcraft example with multiplayer!
The worst is that it's obvious in some cases that the people who submitted these reports weren't regular users of the software. They apparnetly just installed it and tried it to see if it would work with wine. That's great, seeing if things are compatible, helping out - but seriously, to be helpful you have to know what the program is supposed to do and what people actually use it for.
I'm not trying to incite anyone but I don't think anyone who's looked at the Wine AppDB would disagree with me too much. I appreciate the work people put into it, but there needs to be some better standards for deciding how well software works under Wine. It's hard to recommend Wine for anything when it's a total crapshoot whether comments in the AppDB are correct or not.
I personally don't have need to run anything with Wine, but I have attempted on occasion, and have helped others do so. I do run one piece of Windows software - Adobe Lightroom - but I do so in a Windows VM because Wine support for it is extremely limited.
As I think someone else in here noted, a lot of the really well-supported software is stuff like DVD rippers/burners and "utility" apps, of which there are usually multiple excellent open-source programs available to choose from. That's not the kind of software preventing people from switching to linux. Although, I did give up my favorite DVD burning program, ImgBurn, when I stopped using windows several years ago - it does work pretty much flawlessly under wine actually, but I like k3b too :)
I use ubuntu and it depends. Sometimes I just tolerate the bug because I'm tired of the "New version of ubuntu out does this still effect you?" messages I get.
I could understand if it was something not testable to the person saying that. However when the steps to reproduce are download package x and do xyz I think its simple laziness to not just test it yourself, especially when the package from your version of ubuntu has been used in the new version, duh, of course the bug is still there, it's the same package.
There is a large commitment on the bug submitter to do all the work on testing and following up on simple bugs which are reproducible by everyone. This happens in wine too which I follow closely, however to a much less significant degree as it happens in Ubuntu.
i understand your arguement and at one time i used to agree.
but in hindsight, as projects like Wine or Reactos have evolved and improved,
MS has been forced to constantly tweak and change their so called standard win32 api.
it has been a moving target.
now by companies and projects officially supporting Wine,
the open source community have taken control of the standard.
write once and run anywhere.
they've taken the Embrace and Extend system MS has used against everyone else and turned it on it's ear.
call it, Embrace and Define.
it may not be a perfect solution, but this is what happened with Unix. now Unix is an accepted open standard.