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?

Comments

"Success"

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re:windows can run under linux so why bother?

[tlhIngan]

you're funny, people waste hours and days trying to twiddle and fiddle and solve wine issues, if they're solvable at all. If you want to play games from the 90s, install an old windows version and have a stable platform for playing with no fuss, the installation only needs to be done once after all.

Or support open-source and buy a support license from the commercial version of Wine - Crossover from Codewavers. These guys have made WINE setup and installation pretty damn easy. And they actually support the WINE project too, so it's all on the up and up.

Re: Photoshop

[Zero__Kelvin]

WINE literally stands for WINE is NOT an Emulator. You get native Linux performance, so in other words better than on Windows.

Re:WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe.

[fgouget]

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!".

I have never seen that claim made by any Wine developer. Source please.

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.

That's a lie:

$ git log origin/master | grep Author: | head -n 10
Author: Nikolay Sivov <nsivov at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jacek Caban <jacek at codeweavers.com>
Author: Jactry Zeng <jzeng at codeweavers.com>
Author: Huw Davies <huw at codeweavers.com>
Author: Fabian Maurer <dark.shadow4 at web.de>
Author: Vincent Povirk <vincent at codeweavers.com>
Author: Aric Stewart <aric at codeweavers.com>
Author: Nikolay Sivov <nsivov at codeweavers.com>

10 commits, 9 by CodeWeavers developpers. So much for CodeWeavers never sending back patches!

CodeWeavers commits fixes and improvements to Wine first. The benefit of using CrossOver is that it is more up-to-date than Wine Stable, but still goes through a phase of testing and stabilization before it gets into the users hands so it is less buggy than the Wine nightlies.

Also Wine is LGPL, not GPL. Not that it makes any difference in this case.