Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Greatest Successes and Weaknesses With Wine (Software)?
wjcofkc writes: As a distraction, I decided to get the video-editing software Filmora up and running on my Ubuntu box. After some tinkering, I was able to get it installed, only to have the first stage vaporize on launch. This got me reflecting on my many hits and misses with Wine (software) over the years. Before ditching private employment, my last job was with a software company. They were pretty open minded when I came marching in with my System76 laptop, and totally cool with me using Linux as my daily driver after quickly getting the Windows version of their software up and running without a hitch. They had me write extensive documentation on the process. It was only two or three paragraphs, but I consider that another Wine win since to that end I scored points at work. Past that, open source filled in the blanks. That was the only time I ever actually needed (arguably) for it to work. Truth be told, I mostly tinker around with it a couple times a year just to see what does and does not run. Wine has been around for quite awhile now, and while it will never be perfect, the project is not without merit. So Slashdot community, what have been your greatest successes and failures with Wine over the years?
Thats about it. Seems to work fine. I don't see much of a point with anything else. Office I use LibreOffice and web browsers are all written native.
Oh, tetris once ages ago.
One of my ex-gfs. She was always fun with a bite of wine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
if you're running windows wares you "lost the battle already", just run actual windows in a VM and your windows wares will run wonderfully.
... are a physical limitation. Wine with Linux sets you free.
Works GREAT: MS Office 2003, Total Commander, WinRAR, Photoshop 6, RegEx Buddy
Broken Badly and I wish they weren't: Skype, Fractal Painter, Newer Photoshop CS, just about all WWW browsers, and newer Outlook
Most of the time, one is simply backed into a corner when turning to Wine. I hate using it, but it's better than booting into Windows.
I got a recent strategy pc game to run fine (albeit slowly). Heres the catch: i was an early alpha tester and the game didnt even have textures yet. The game developer was shocked when i told him it worked
Minesweeper was the only thing I ever got to run with it. And notepad, maybe. Wine sucked eggs since its inception. Bet it still does?!
As of a year or two ago, most of my (at least older) Windows games started working quite well.
I've setup a PXE server for which clients can run quite a few games, including various games running under wine .Easy ol'-fashioned LAN party!
What manner of Skinner box did this OP crawl out of to propose such irrational selfishness! To WINE or not to WINE that is the question they proposed. If WINE exists then that alone is success. Come try to destroy it and you shall fail.
My greatest success was giving up and just using a full windows VM under Parallels.
Fiddling with wine is fine when you're living alone with nothing better to do. But when you have stuff you need to get done, the last thing you have time for is fiddling around with esoteric settings and figuring out why your particular version of a DLL won't work just so you can get your chosen app running.
The only thing I would need Wine for is for configuring and updating various USB devices that can only speak to Windows. Other than that, I can do just about everything else I need to do without Windows.
No USB on Wine means it's useless to me. Yeah its really great that they spend so much time tweaking the FPS on games. If maybe 1 /10 that effort was devoted to USB it would bring Wine to a whole new level.
Face it Wine has reached "end of life" development-wise. They've hit a dead end and the only sign of any life is getting some obscure game running at bronze level. Big whoop.
"They had me write extensive documentation on the process. It was only two or three paragraphs, ..."
Perhaps something is missing here - but, in most contexts, "two or three paragraphs" is nowhere near "extensive" documentation. That's more along the lines of "better than nothing".
#DeleteChrome
I played World of Warcraft from vanilla to MoP under the default Wine that was rolled out with Debian. Never had a problem. Well, aside from the problems caused by too much time sunk into WoW....
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Wtf is with all these stories lately that look like they were written by Bennett Haselton?
iTunes 7 (which was about the newest version that would work with my netbook) worked fine, as it was the only way to play my FairPlay DRM'd stuff.
as another poster said, everything else was native alternatives (LibreOffice, GIMP) or native browser
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I have a 16-bit program (originally run under Windows 3.0) which I believe the only way to run now is under Wine.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Two words.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
On Linux or MacOSX is my most common use of WINE.
Really easy to get going (as long as you were careful where you put the mouse as the tool tips caused a crash :-)
And Photoshop 6 as per one of the previous comments. Gimp is good, but occasionally you need CMYK support.
or, for another way of putting it, "I used it to fail a semester of college"
Successes?
I have never accomplished to get anything working with Wine. Not even with hours upon hours of manual, help pages, forum, etc. reading.
What a horrible piece of forever-incomplete, always unstable, butt-ugly malware it is.
The only reason I still have a windows machine around (running Win7) is to be able to run SketchUp. The MacOS version sucks and the pared-down web one is abysmal.
Has anyone been successful running it under Wine?
I could list a bunch of other stories, of games and fun stuff, but Ages ago, just before I graduated with a Bachelors Degree, in the far off year of 2008, I had to take this Statistics Course that was unrelated to my Major. It was like one of those Dangling Gen-Ed courses. It was done completely online and it absolutely required Internet Explorer 6.x
You could NOT do the tests on anything else. So I had a Dell Ubuntu Laptop that Ran I think it was Hardy Heron, that had a Wine Isolated Prefix that ran IE6 just for this site. This course was a miserable slog of difficulty, and it required alot of studying and concentration, and then, came the day, of the online Final Exam which had to be Proctored by a Certified Disabilities Coordinator for my case.
I get in the Computer lab, they all run XP... and they all run Internet Explorer 7. Not one system will load the site to take the exam. I brought my laptop with me, and the Disabilies Coordinator contacted the Professor and gave the OK for me to bot up my Linux Laptop, plug it into the Ethernet Jack, and take the exam... I made a B. But had I not had my Wine capable laptop running Linux and IE6, I'd have failed that exam, and likely the class.
The next semester, the entire IE6 application that was made on was redone in Flash and suddenly worked in FireFox with the Linux Flash NPAPI module.
WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe.
This is because they always counted the number of API calls they succeed in handling, and then the one they failed at was "just that one".
So you always had "((N-1)/N * 100)% of calls worked!".
To get you over that hump, you've always had to to go with a commercial version of WINE, like CrossOver, where they don't ever shove the final fixes back into the actual WINE code -- despite the GPL.
If the WINE guys are diligent, and go over the published GPL'ed code, and bring the changes back, that's fine, but... there's always this huge latency.
So from day one, they lied with statistics, and when something started running, then hey, that was great, but not everything was going to run.
Today, it's more disappointing, since unless you run older Windows programs, from older versions of Windows, things are back to broken.
I boot up my Windows 10 desktop or surface and things just work.
Once in a blue moon I will install a Linsux VM for fun in Hyper-V, laugh, and quickly delete it.
sw complete saga, indiana jones 2. Office 2010, ie7, quakelive.
Learning to not care about the OS and going with the one that gives me the largest ecosystem of quality software.
Success: Questrade IQ Edge (Canadian broker)
Weakness: Fidelity Active Trader Pro (US broker)
Details:
Questrade IQ Edge works quite well under Wine, although it freezes if I try to minimize its window.
Fidelity Active Trader Pro almost finishes starting up, but fails at the last moment with an unhelpful error message. Funny thing is, Fidelity uses Crossover (a Wine derivative) to run Active Trader Pro on Macs. I'm wondering whether it's worth buying the Linux version of Crossover.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I think what impressed me most was Skyrim working pretty much out-of-the box. It needed a little prodding to set the amount of VRAM up correctly, but apart from that it Just Worked. It was the first game where I'd not even bothered trying to run it via Windows at all.
Windows hobbled on for a bit longer, occasionally curling up into a ball because I dared to put two PCIe cards in back in slightly different slots, or add a new disk for the ZFS array to use. Then, when it finally self-destructed entirely, I realised that I didn't need it anymore because all the windows games I had were working well enough under WINE. Last year I was persuaded to try Wolfenstein: New Order, and Old Blood - again, they worked out of the box which was impressive. Not sure I'll be so lucky with New Colossus.
Games aside, it's also been very handy for running an ancient version of SONAR I've been using since about 2002. That also had the advantage of allowing me to keep using a USB MIDI interface which Windows 7 had no support for.
Biggest disappointment was Fallout 4, which did not work out of the box and still isn't working as far as I know, though it's getting very close. FO3 and New Vegas are working happily though, even as it gets more and more difficult to run them under Windows itself.
Obviously your mileage may vary. If you have more space and more money to throw at hardware than I do, getting a second machine - or indeed a games console - would achieve the same results with less hassle, and less cat-fighting over the boot block than a dual-boot system. Faffing around with PCIe passthroughs to get a virtual windows instance is another possible approach, but I'd have to buy another licence for an operating system I actively dislike. Besides SONAR, all my day-to-day software is linux-based, so for me, Wine is a really good way of stringing it all together.
Try to run anything (especially games) and you're missing libraries that you have to download with the third-party tool winetricks from a fourth-party server run by Microsoft. They can cut us off at any time. This is inherently broken, even if it's what the maintainers have to do to keep it legal. Some pirate ought to back up the libraries and make an alternative wine distro that comes with everything a user might need.
Try running rpgmaker games. Usually, wine doesn't detect that the rpgmaker runtime has been installed. Most games have Midi background music which I've never gotten to work in Wine. Sometimes mp3s don't work either. A lot of games come out of Japan with fanmade translation patches, but Wine cannot find files in any subdirectories that include Japanese characters.
It's not easy, and every few years the way you have to do it changes, but if you don't do that, you can't take ebooks out of the library, so it's worth the pain.
Foobar2k is the best music player I can find and I run it under Linux with Wine - love it!
All because Bluecat IPAM requires the Silverlight crap, and I was sick of firing up a VM or VDI *just* to adjust permissions on a DNS or IP record
Lots of negative comments here. I stand in awe of the Wine project - what a terrifying overlap it must be between the Windows and Unix API worlds.... makes me shudder...
We moved our 5 home PCs to Ubuntu a couple of years ago, and figured the Linux games market was strong enough to cover most of the family's needs - Minecraft, KSP, Portal 2, etc. When my 14 yr old son suggested we try Wine to get some of the old games running (AoE, FarCry, RtCW....), I had low expectations!
And it took a bit of tweaking, but we got them all to come to life. The biggest impediment was that we ran into confusion over whether to go with the Ubuntu-bundled version of Wine or a later one; I think it was when we upgraded Ubuntu to 16.04 with Wine 2.x, and everything started working nicely. Amazed at how well Steam works with it - we never thought SpinTires would work, but it did, with no tweaks.
The things that have been the least successful have been CAD applications. We build a CNC machine, and just about all the CAD software out there is for Windows and is hard to run under Wine. My suspicion is that hobby-grade-CAD developers are more CAD than devs, and commit weird sins under the hood...
My Mother-In-Law purchased tax software, installed it, used it, and transmitted her taxes using Wine. She did not even realize that she had done so using Wine on Linux instead of Windows.
I have never successfully gotten Myst to run.
- --
"I Hate Quotes" -- Samuel L. Clemens
Back in the 2001 or thereabout a company was started called Lindows. Some might remember this company. It was a distribution that had the idea that if they just funded WINE and integrated it they'd have a Microsoft Windows compatible system and a market. Eventually, after spending millions of dollars on WINE the company realized it was NEVER going to work. So they started investing in developing native software for GNU/Linux. That actually ended up working pretty well. Now they did all sorts of things wrong particularly from a business perspective. For example they shipped systems and recommended hardware that just flat out couldn't be supported properly. Ultimately the system was unusable by the masses only because the hardware support sucked. Today it's a bit easier with companies like ThinkPenguin.com offering a properly supported selection of hardware that ship with native drivers right in the mainline kernel and similar. However that's what Lindows should have done and WINE should have never been on the companies radar. Lindows eventually became Linspire and Linspire is what became Canonical / Ubuntu. Sort of. Canonical hired a bunch of Linspire's developers and continued the downward trend of coming up with an easy to use desktop distribution.
Humorously to one extant or another Ubuntu is more stable than Linspire ever was, but it lacks some of the polish of Linux Mint and Linspire. Unfortunately Canonical hasn't managed to figure out how to make the desktop work financially and it'll eventually collapse. Well, we're already seeing that collapse unfold.
It was '01 or so, last time I worked strictly on a *nix box (an x86 running Linux). I was writing device drivers at the time (PCI, 802.11, and a completely new one for the chip we were making). Could have used 3-4 Windows tools, none of them worked under Wine. FWIW I was also the sysadmin for our network of Linux boxes.
That job ended in '03 (startup ran out of money), and little did I know it would be the last time I'd work in a *nix environment. Why? Cygwin. I could run Windows, get all the Windows programs, and still use the *nix command line tools for software development. Turns out, unless you're writing device drivers (or something I've never written), you can get by just fine with cygwin.
I'm about to change my Win10 box to Linux. Why? Not telemetry. Not because games have become "good enough" under Linux. No. I'm sick and tired of closing my laptop for dinner, opening it up an hour later, only to find the goddamned thing has rebooted. Fuck that shit. I hate the telemetry, not a fan of the Win10 UI, like my games. But FFS, it sucks when I can't count on opening a laptop and going back to what I was doing when I closed it.
Random rebooting. 3 words. Fuck That Shit.
Success: Doom 2016 runs flawlessly with Vulkan thanks to a patch someone released in December.
Also runs well: Crysis 2, Age of Empires 2 HD, starcraft 2, CEMU emulator, battle.net.
Buggy but works: Steam
Failures: Any game that runs on origin. Could never get it running E.g. Mass Effect 3. Most dx11 and dx12 supported titles.
I only use it for gaming and everything else can be done using purely open source. I keep a windows 7 vm for emergencies and for testing my own software.
Back when Wine was alpha grade software, I had a copy of Red Hat's branded WABI installed on my Slackware system. I launched Wine to run the progman.exe file in the WABI Windows environment and it loaded up the whole Windows 3 desktop.
It was pretty cool.
The 1996 Penguin Hutchinson Encyclopedia Library (PHRL96). I keep that running in a Wine-managed desktop window more or less constantly; I've tried on-line encyclopedias like Artha and Panlexicon and even Wordnet, and the thesaurus in PHRL96 is still the best one I own. Also: Half-Life. The original. Recently re-played it, and it works wonderfully.
Skype is being built on ReactXP, delivering the same client across all platforms including Linux. No need to run Skype through WINE.
https://microsoft.github.io/re...
Dialog Semiconductor's Production Line Tool (a GUI-driven BLE chip programming tool) was not available to run under Linux - or anything but Windows 7, 7-pro, 8, or 8.1 - all now made of unobtanium.
It would run (kinda) on wine with mono and a real Microsoft .NET install. But some important GUI components didn't render correctly, so necessary operator feedback fields were not readable, making it unusable.
(When our 7-Pro machine goes belly-up the lab is toast.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Exactly this. The only things I ever need Windows for are for connecting proprietary devices via USB to make configuration tweaks or update firmware. These devices have no software for any OS other than Windows, and require a USB connection to do the updates.
Wine can't do that, which means Linux can't do that. Which means I need a full blown Windows install available to me just to update junk hardware.
Beyond that I see absolutely zero reason to run any Windows only program. There's so much high quality software available for Linux that usually works even better than the Windows equivalent that I never even consider trying to run a Windows program through Wine.
Basically the Wine devs are focusing all their energy in the wrong places. It's those stupid one off hardware update programs that need addressing, not yet another copy of a program that already has a superior native Linux application that does the same thing better anyway.
I don't understand why no government has invested in Wine.
The NSA intercepts and modifies Cisco routers, introduces vulnerabilities in security standards, does not hesitate to intercept Google's cross-datacenter traffic, forces US ISPs to install black boxes for monitoring, and pulls all kinds of other stunts. But despite Microsoft being in the same jurisdiction as the NSA and possibly subject to various secret orders, most countries just happily depend on Windows, going so far as using it in their armies!
If Windows were to suddenly disappear the economy of most countries would instantly crash: banks, ATMs, airports, travel agencies, even some fuel stations; none of these would work without Windows. They all use software that would need to be rewritten from scratch to be ported to another platform, an endeavor that would take years. That makes Windows a critical resource, one for which there should be multiple sources, just like for oil, etc. Yet, if you need Windows there is only one company you can turn to: Microsoft.
Given the number of custom Windows applications involved, the only credible way to fix this situation is to improve Wine. And improving Wine is easy when you have a government's budget: even hiring 10 competent developers to contribute to Wine full-time would make a significant difference. If only five countries in the world did that it would more than double the number of developers working on Wine full-time!
Since when is "extensive documentation" "two or three paragraphs"?
I recently switched back to Linux after many years away. No regrets at all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Having used wine since the 90s, it was still quite a milestone for me at least that I was able to buy Diablo 3 on release day, install and play it in wine without problems, I played that game all the way to the end. Platinum. Bravo Wine devs, Bravo.
Works flawlessly in Wine, and is still better than Audacity. Hell, Cool Edit from 1998 is better than Audacity.
Other Wine wins:
Half Life 1 (pre Steam)
UltraVNC viewer (better than remmina)
Keil uVision, except for debugging.
sig: sauer
Greatest Success: Installing Heroes of Might & Magic 3 in 2005.
Greatest weakness: Not being able to install said program anymore in 2017.
PlayOnLinux is pretty much required to run more than a few programs with Wine, and it's still only marginally easier than just manually configuring multiple instances of Wine. Why doesn't Wine include this functionality (POL is just executed so poorly).
Got me Dungeons and Dragons Online up and running ~ 5 years ago. Portals did not appear, and it didn't look _quite_ as good as on Windows, but the whole interface was more responsive.
Dear editors:
Successes and Failures *or* Strengths and Weaknesses
Go directly to middle school -- do not pass GO -- do not collect $200.
In a previous, misguided life, I had used windows, for almost a decade. After all the Windows Telemetry BS, I decided, Windows and me couldn't be friends anymore.
For the last, almost two years now, I've been using Linux (Fedora) full time on both my Desktop and Laptop. Pretty much the only Windows applications that I couldn't find decent Linux replacements of were foobar2000, Password Safe (https://pwsafe.org/) (pwsafe has an open-source Linux version, it sucks donkey balls), and of course, photoshop. passwordsafe, and foobar2000 both run GREAT in wine. I didn't have to do any sort of tweaking to get them up and running. Photoshop CS5, was another story. I never could get it to run correctly without crashing or having graphical glitches, and in the end just gave up and installed a windows VM just for Photoshop.
But FFS, it sucks when I can't count on opening a laptop and going back to what I was doing when I closed it.
That's actually a problem I've had, on-and-off, with my various linux laptops for years.
Works like a charm.
Other than that, I tend to avoid Wine and also don't really need it these days.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
For both. Worked for awhile but as the game updated it lost compatibility then gained it back, etc. etc. So both wins and losses
A full portable Linux OS on my USB stick, _including_ MS Office 2007! Portable MS Office! All my colleagues are jealous :-D
Some years ago I suddenly had a craving to revisit the mid 90'ies games I had played. WINE was perfect for this, as Windows - even with compatibility modes - didn't exactly like games like Colonization or Warcraft 1.
For something like this, WINE is really good because it runs old stuff quite well.
For all new software, You're Doing It Wrong (TM) if you use WINE. An OS is just a tool, so run the one that the software was designed for. Native or in a VM, doesn't matter. But don't use something inferior when you can have the real thing.
Sketchup 2016 took a while to get running, but it's working well now.
HeidiSQL works immediately and is one of the few windows programs I still use.
Once tried to get a tax application (wrapped mshta.exe based crap) working on wine, but gave up on it.
Question asked:
Slashdot headline:
Are we afraid of the word "failure" now?
For 18 years I have kept a Windows partition on my Linux box for one reason only: to file my income tax once a year. Neither H&R Block nor TaxCut software runs on wine. Same with Crossover. Unless you want to fill out your returns by hand and mail them it, you MUST use Windows or Macintosh to file your taxes. And you know what happens when you boot into Windows after a year--updates. :O
I regularly run the following applications for their Linux alternatives largely suck:
* Adobe Photoshop CS2 // b.
* Far file manager
* Mp3tag
* IrfanView
* NotePad++
My greatest success is that I do not need it. The one program, I need to run on Windows once a year I use an old laptop. I have also configured it that I can connect remotely to it.
I could use a VM, but having a remotely accessible box is much easier.
With the prices that hardware are, having a dedicated machine that you connect to remotely is so much easier.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In Windows 10, open Settings -> Update & Security -> Windows Update -> Restart options -> Enable the "Show more modifications" button
With that enabled, the system will never just randomly reboot. You'll get a toaster-style notification pop up so that you can reboot or dismiss an immediate reboot when it's available. I point this out because it amazes me how many fucking nerds have NO FUCKING IDEA how to configure the operating system they love to complain about. People like you prefer to whine rather than solve your own problems. IT'S FUCKING INFURIATING!
You'd think Wine would keep a database and link it from the main page on http://winehq.org so people could share their findings and save each other a lot of time.
I'm using qemu+kvm with pass-thru usb for that.
I've even hacked qemu so that a usb device could appear inside the vm with a different vendor or product id than the real one (I don't know if they implemented such a feature in qemu or in the usb subsystem of the linux kernel since then).
Qemu has also the advantage that it lets you extend the evaluation period of any software indefinitely, by faking the time inside the vm using its "-rtc base=etc" option and using the -snapshot feature to discard any permanent changes.
I think that relates to "native performance" and "no emulation".
It happens that games usually rely on an API (Direct X up to 11) that doesn't exit on Linux and has no close equivalent.
For games you need a whole emulation layer that will emulate a Direct X API by using the closest API Linux has (usually OpenGL).
Lots of games DO work, but they still get some performance hit and require an emulation of sort (even if a high-level one).
Though currently, the things are changing :
- Most games are slowly switching to the low-level Vulkan API, which does exist as-is on Linux, so wine can function as the usual translation layer. (e.g.: Doom (2016) )
- DirectX 12 has nothing to do with past iterations of DirectX and is a similar low-level API to Vulkan. Meaning that simple DirectX 12 to Vulkan thin translation layer could be possible. (currently being worked on)
- There are attempts of building DirectX 9 and 10/11 drivers running on low-level APIs existing on linux (either on top of Vulkan, or on top of Mesa' Gallium3D - the low-level back-ends used traditionally on Linux by high-level API state trackers - except by Nvidia's). This could also potentially avoid the overhead of DirectX over OpenGL emulations.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Works better than Meld, doesn't do multi file comparisons though. Still looking for a good native OSX merge tool... and WinMerge/Wine is only about 400 MB, not too bad for such a complex program ;-)
The windows XP laptop of my parents was becoming almost unusable because of slowness. I wanted to migrate them to a small desktop with ubuntu. Like old people, they receive many powerpoint documents. The perfect working of powerpoint viewer with wine was a condition sine qua none for my plan. It is working perfectly since 2013.
When i started working, they still used Lotus Notes as a mail server in the late 90's. Ofcourse there was no native Linux client, but it worked perfectly in wine.
At home, also around that period, or maybe a little later, i used a product from codeweavers to enable windows only browser plugins. It was a sad period on the internet when a lot of sites used plugins that were not available on Linux, worked fine using the codeweavers wine browser implementation (although, a bit high on CPU usage).
Other than that, i was able to run WoW when it came out faster then all my friends who ran it native in windows.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
WinSCP for occasional editing of webpages + Pageant (part of Putty tools) to supply private key. But I got to write custom wrapper to make WinSCP launch native editor. Together that makes a usable combination. HeidiSQL and KeePass2 work without any significant glitches, I use them on daily basis.
Random rebooting. 3 words. Fuck That Shit.
First of all, no serious user should use a laptop, period. They are always wonky pieces of fragile shit and slower than any comparable desktop. Second, you'll have major headaches using Linux on a laptop. Suspend/Resume operations are rarely reliable. Ask around.
That really doesn't mean much. Case in point: I had a high school classmate who cut off his dick and changed his gender to a woman. He also said he has no regrets. Coincidentally, every time I've had to use Linux felt like dating a transsexual. It doesn't feel right and leaves me feeling icky.
Where did you get the idea that wine doesn't talk usb?
I RE several scientific instruments with an USB interface by looking at what their proprietary software was doing under wine...
it worked fine.
I mostly use WINE for Falcon BMS (I hope to migrate it to Linux fully once win7 support ends) and for running some GOG.com stuff, and most of the stuff works out of the box. Maybe your screen is fscked upon exit but that's no biggie really as you can reset it just fine using the display settings (wine staging in Mint 18.2).
The biggest failure was trying to get some software provided by our daughter's school to run... wouda thunk given it was "just" some VB atrocity?
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
I found a copy of the virus that was used to exfiltrate data from Sony Entertainment's computers and then wipe them (supposedly the virus was developed by North Koreans, in response to the movie The Interview, but actually, my own forensics suggest that the authors were South Korean). In the process of studying the virus, I must have accidentally double-clicked on the executable in Nautilus when I was trying to drag it to move it into another directory. For whatever stupid reason, Nautilus is set up to run Windows executables in Wine when they are double-clicked. A couple of minutes later, I noticed files were starting to disappear all over my hard drive. I panicked and held down the power button for 5 seconds to hard-shutdown the computer. Sure enough, when I rebooted, I discovered that tens of thousands of files were gone. It's a real victory for Linux compatibility with Windows when Wine can run viruses just as well as Windows.
I have this problem of random sudden reboots with my Lenovo X220 notebook running Linux. I believe it is due to its hardware/firmwares. And sure I use the notebook only as a thin terminal for a beefy rack server so in the end it does not matter much.
I review free adventure games for Adventure Gamers each month. Many of them are made in Adventure Game Studio. These run perfectly in wine on the Mac. I hardly ever have to reboot into Windows to be able to play a free adventure game.
-- Cheers!
What I also hate is when I start Win10 up and I have to wait 15 minutes because the bloody thing is updating itself. Why can't it do that in the background, or at least let me choose when I f*** want it to update??
-- Cheers!
No. I'm sick and tired of closing my laptop for dinner, opening it up an hour later, only to find the goddamned thing has rebooted
If you can't even RTFM and get the most basic of Windows settings right you're not going to be happy with Linux.
From Win3/NT I've run almost every version of windows in a dual boot manner. Many programs I use are an install once, move many.
I created a separate directory for them off of the C: Drive, and installed them there.
Now with Linux Mint I can go to that programs directory, right click on the executable, and run with wine. It works very well for me.
My only loss is PowerPro http://powerpro.cresadu.com/ it's so integrated into Windows it's a waste of time trying to get it to work.
Successes: Office 2007, Euchre game (euchreusa.com), Epson wireless projector software for work (this is a HUGE success, it lets me run Linux in my classroom), Pearson test generator software, and Matlab R14 (original license was Windows, I don't have a licensed Linux version).
Failures: H&R Block tax software (which is cheaper than using their website).
All of these were tested with Crossover 16.2.5. I'm happy to support them - they make a quality product and help support the Wine project.
I also agree with another poster who mentioned that Wine is pretty much the best way to run 16-bit Windows applications. I have a REALLY old version of MATLAB (5.3) that works only with Wine.
Failure: I have never trusted Wine enough to run Turbotax on it.
I should write a book. Wine has been a huge help in my transition to GNU/Linux over the last 2 years.
My top 3 successes using Wine are, in order: 1) Voobly + Age of Empires 2: The Forgotten Empires, 2) Pale Moon Portable with Google Voice audio calling, and 3) Irfanview.
Voobly is a matchmaking site for the classic RTS game, Age of Empires 2. Technically I use PlayOnLinux to make things easier for myself, but it depends on Wine. I have this working on Fedora 25/systemd, and Devuan 1.0/init. It works on my devu an install on an old Dell Latitude D630, better than in the Windows 7 install I used to have on that hardware.
Pale Moon Portable, so the Windows portable edition, which I carried around on a flash drive for years before setting on a daily driver system, which I would rebuild every so many years. It started as Firefox 2.x Portable and around the Firefox 27 days I switched to Pale Moon. Anyways, it runs just fine in Wine and after some dedicated research got the Google voice audio calls working in it.
Irfanview, the graphics viewer. It runs wonderfully in Wine, and is pretty basic.
First of all, the good part: Wine is cool because it sometimes actually WORKS and that is a major accomplishment.
The Windows API is actually a huge collection of APIs, with multiple, sometimes incompatible versions, continuously evolving and only partially documented, with only the closed-source windows implementation as a guideline for how the API actually is supposed to work.
The fact that wine can even deal at all with the complexity of DirectX, D3D etc, at least until DirectX9, is something to marvel at.
So congrats are due to Alexandre Julliard and all the other contributors for the basic infrastructure that resisted surprisingly well an organic evolution to start dealing with windows 3 and ending up with modern 32bit and 64bit Windows, and in particular I think Stefan Doesinger for the incredible work on DirectX/D3D.
Now the not so good part: I have hacked wine for years in order to get all kinds of software working (mostly games). Some of my patches are in wine, some are not. I have considered wine for some migration projects, but in business environments it is just not usable, because the application compatibility is so hit or miss.
And, more importantly, it just changes from version to version, with zero control on actual progress.
In general the development process is just not focused on application compatibility, which would be the only business reason to use wine in the first place.
There are regression tests in the code, but the tests themselves have not been validated for full completeness and correctness. Nowadays they run them on windows native too, but the coverage of API parameters is just too low.
There is no application compatibility regression testing, but wine does asks random people to report if applications are working or not (on the Wine AppDB):
https://appdb.winehq.org/
These results are not uniform and there are so many different setups and variables and patches around that the results are not really comparable.
Look at the difference with dosbox (ok much simpler problem to solve, but still). Dosbox actually track basic working usecases, for each version:
https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?letter=a
This makes dosbox actually useful. You can use the latest version and you know it is better than the previous one.
By contrast, in wine each new version is a hit or miss. Applications might break.
Old reported errors are considered closed or auto-solved after years of being "abandoned" (usually by the user either dying or giving up I guess)
To sum it up, it is an incredible technical exercise, great for games if you are willing to put the development effort in to choose the right wine version and fix the bugs yourself for that specific version, but not destined for any business use for Windows to Linux migration, because of lack of: a) project focus on measurable progress, b) some applications sometimes never ever working, c) regressions
With appropriate funding and direction, possibly it could have been different, but if we haven't seen it happen in the 90s or early 2000s we are probably not seeing it happen now. Still I hope these guys keep hacking at this, if only for the games!
Getting direct X working and running the game was cool!
Make sure you have the right drivers for your graphics card under linux!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The problem is that this still involves agreeing to a Microsoft EULA and all its overreach.
The point isn't "how can I run Windows?" It's "how can I avoid running Windows?"
I was finally able to switch my Mother over to GNU/Linux this year. Why? Quicken 20xx (can't remember exactly which one) finally works reliably under Wine.
She was already using Firefox, Libreoffice, and Thunderbird. She doesn't do anything else with the computer. Her Vista machine was dying the typical Microsoft death of a thousand blue screens. I showed her other programs beside quicken, but she was unwilling to even try any other financial program. Finally this Summer her version installed and ran without any problems under Wine, so I burned Windows off the machine with fire and installed Xubuntu 16.04 LTS. She loves it.