A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years Though it may not have managed to bring Linux to the desktop in any meaningful sense, 4 July marks 25 years since the first stable release of not-a-Windows-emulator, Wine. Created in 1993 as a way of inflicting Windows 3.1 applications on the then positively pristine Linux world (mastermind Linus Torvalds had only just emitted …
<p>@Teiwaz
If everyone approved of what you've typed, what would even be the point? A downvote means that, barring a script doing the downvoting, someone had to read and comprehend something that disagrees with their views.
<p>And back to on-topic..
<p>WINE has been a source of entertainment for me for the last 15ish years. Projects such as Everquest and World of Warcraft with frequent, incremental changes, and multiple executables almost almost always had workarounds, both on WINE HQ and the official forums for the games, available on patch days. Occasional fixes under Linux actually resulted in performance boosts that "mysteriously" found their way back into the Windows client within the next month or so. Both the monthly subscription and freemium styles of supporting game development played nice (pirating the client wasn't a loss to sales... up until 3rd party emulated servers popped up, but that's another story). Telemetry in WINE is opt-in, and makes clear to the user how to disable it at any time, and is auditable by anyone that cares to prior to opting in.
<p>Any application that really is a "must have" gets time and money thrown at it up to the point that the "must have" portions become usable. Anything that's known to be illegal due to software patents in certain jurisdictions is labeled as such, but still made available with warnings. It's a model that actually respects fair use and intellectual property rights, and doesn't begin with an assumption of guilt in the wording (the way more than a few digital rights management systems I've encountered have).
<p>WINE is like a figurative bridge spanning multiple cliff faces (Linux, Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, and others). Lanes close for construction on occasion, but it has acted as a shield against lock-in and monoculture (no apologies for the pun, I regret nothing).
<p>I look forward to more of the cycle of frustration and elation any time something stops working and I read up enough to submit a bug report and live with the work around until some with more skill and patience than I takes an interest in fixing it.
Remember those? Games, educational programs on CD-ROM. Most of them do not run any more on modern Windows version, but Wine can usually be made to run them, after tweaking application-specific settings suitably. Many years ago I used to do this to make some kids games run on my Linux box for my child (he has long since outgrown them). Sometimes it was not trivial. Wine did not support some palette color modes, unless run in a X11 server with palette color. Solution was to run the wine inside a Xephyr window (an X11 server running inside X11), which can be configured to have a different color depth from the host.
I was devastated when Cedega went away, but luckily Wine has kept up for the last 9 years.
Currently I am rocking a 1080 Ti and I can play WoW on ultra mode and get full frame rates much of the time. I'm currently using the Lutris launcher FYI.
Infinite Thanks to the Wine project!
Do you still need to copy a working install from a Windows instance, or is there another way around it?
Do you ever get banhmmered? Had that once with WoW under WINE, something to do with the security software not working as expected. Did get the account back, but it's still a bit of a pain.
You had curbed your ego's
Microsoft has trashed my productivity and capacity
You have trashed my hardware...much hardware . from about 2010 you just went rabid
and I was running a Redhat 5.2 Powertools with a Mozilla mirror tha t had just about anything they or anyone invented and that did not break anything but since 2010.
Some folks are still trying hard but phew, sad .sad .sad
I've long thought MS should just contribute all their "legacy" code into the Wine project, and just use that as the way to run legacy applications. That would free them up to purge the old APIs from their core OS without killing off the customer base (although I expect they would have preferred to do that under the X11-licensed ReWind fork back when that was still a viable project).
I recall hearing of a US accounting software company, producing software to handle the annual US income tax returns, which actively supports Wine.
I know of other companies that make a point of treating Wine as another Windows version in testing and development.
And yet there is well-known software, with Linux versions available, which suffers from what seems to be woefully inadequate testing. Some of them depend on specialised *Nix software on their servers, yet struggle to maintain Linux-compatible software for their customers to use.
I see far more variation that your reporter does.
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