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Wine 1.4 Released
vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."
It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.
Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?
It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...
I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.
Better question I can think of - which Windows apps does one want to run under Linux/BSD? Office? IE? Chrysis? I checked out 2 versions of Minesweeper - one under Wine, and one native in Linux. Preferred the native one. Of course, if I prefer Office 2003 to Calligra Suite (I still find Office 2007 a pain to work w/), I might prefer Wine. Maybe QuickBooks could use Wine? That's one of the few apps I can think of that doesn't have a good replacement in Linux.
But honestly, I think a lot of apps could use a WABI like approach. In the past, they suffered, but the main reason for that was that WABI was about running Wintel binaries on RISC based Unixstations, such as Suns, HP-9000s, RS/6000 workstations and so on. But heck, NT on RISC itself couldn't run Wintel binaries, so it's no surprise that these platforms did worse. But w/ any Intel based Unix - be it Linux, BSD or whatever, that should not be an issue. If I'm working in an X based desktop, such as KDE or GNOME or something similar, I don't expect my applications to look like Windows to the point that even the Window menus and everything have to be identical: a KDE or GNOME look & feel is okay.
I think a better goal would be that instead of targetting Office 2010, which like 2007 is a new UI - ribbons & everything, make the native Linux Offices - LibreOffice, Calligra Suite, et al as similar to Office 2003 as possible, and promote that to users. I had been a long time Office 2003 user, and I find 2007 tough to navigate, despite being so fluent w/ its predecessor. And I'm not a typical lay user. So if the new Office suites were to target 2003 and win over their users, a lot would have been achieved. Similarly, use Wine for things like QuickBooks, while in the meantime, hopefully, add something in the KDE Office apps suite to work w/ it, and hopefully make some arrangements w/ banks to support it.
I have no suggestions about the games. Only thing I think would be good - something like Windows Movie Maker - dunno whether OpenShot video editor fits the bill. Cinerella and Avidemux are way too complicated.
I do hope that ReactOS matures soon, so that by the time MS has cleaned up its act on Windows 8, ReactOS is a good enough replacement for both XP and 7.
What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.
Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What's wrong with Win 7?
You have to click on something to scroll it, no always on top menu item (even though th OS supports it), no tabbed file browsing, window title text looks terrible, the list goes on. basically a whole host of minor annoyances that really add up