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?
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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