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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?
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.
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!
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."
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.
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.
Learning to not care about the OS and going with the one that gives me the largest ecosystem of quality software.
"To WINE or not to WINE that is the question they proposed."
Yes, that is what the OP proposed as a topic of conversation.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
Along with some salted hash browns.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
WINE literally stands for WINE is NOT an Emulator. You get native Linux performance, so in other words better than on Windows.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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!
with gravy.
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.
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.
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
Question asked:
Slashdot headline:
Are we afraid of the word "failure" now?
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.
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 ]
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.
I said that when I correctly stated what it stands for ... weren't you paying attention?.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There is no layer of abstraction. They implement the Windows API on Linux. When using actual Windows .dlls there may be a few instructions of overhead, but nothing that comes close to being significant.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
I used it to run the gaming backend server for quake 3, call of duty, battlefield, etc.
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.
It is not "bullshit". You evidently don't know how emulators work. WINE is indeed NOT and emulator.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
WiNE stands for WINE is Not an Emulator" and WINE does not do emulation. I'm not sure which claim you were trying to make, but as usual you are wrong again. Happy Dumbfucksgiving litter stalker friend!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It isn't open to argument, though I do concede it is common for people to be confused about this. If one to were define emulation the way you are defining it then every C++ compiler that implements the STL would be an STL emulator. WINE implements the Windows API. It does not emulate it. You can learn more about the difference between emulation and implementation, specifically as it relates to WINE, here.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
API calls are the layer of abstraction, but we are talking about emulation. There is no extra layer of abstraction as the GP wrongly contends.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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?"