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Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Greatest Successes and Weaknesses With Wine (Software)?

Posted by BeauHD on from the screw-cap dept.

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?

5 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Broke and Working - here's my top 5 by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Unusual Wine Story with IE6. by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:alpha stage game by war4peace · · Score: 5, Funny

    The game developer was shocked because the game had been released 6 months ago and had all features implemented... but under Wine it looked like an early alpha with no textures.

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  4. Re:windows can run under linux so why bother? by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:WINE has always lived in the Bizarro Universe. by fgouget · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.