Countering arguments against Wine

Holly Bostick motub at planet.nl
Mon Nov 1 20:47:40 CST 2004


Ryan Underwood wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 04:32:02PM +0200, Holly Bostick wrote:
> 
> 
>>find that it doesn't necessarily "feel strange" or at least as strange 
>>as I might have imagined. What mostly feels strange is the complications 
>>of getting the program started in the first place (having to cd to the 
>>application folder to run wine <program_name> from a terminal, or having 
>>to write a little start script in order to make a panel shortcut to it).
> 
> 
> You might look into the kernel's miscellaneous binary format support.
> On my Debian system, with binfmt-support package installed, I can
> directly execute a PE executable (WINE is invoked automatically by the
> kernel).
> 

Yes, I've just installed that for the first time during my recent kernel 
upgrade. Haven't really tested it out, though.

However, I think that the presence of this ability is not necessarily a 
strong counter-argument since 1) it requires the user to either be quite 
familiar with their system, or know such a person, in order to set it up 
in the first place, and 2) is not necessarily useful if you have more 
than one Wine variant (or version) on the system (haven't checked this 
out either, but I expect problems).

It is not necessarily unreasonable for a home, multi-user computer to 
"need", let us say, Crossover Office (or regular Wine) for Dad's work, 
and Cedega (or regular Wine, possibly a different version) for the kids' 
games.

What binary is going to be invoked when the user double-clicks, if 
different applications need to be run with different versions/types of 
Wine?

OK, I'll grant you that if a user knows how to install multiple versions 
of Wine on a system without conflict, they probably won't care about 
this double-clicking business in the first place, and I'll also grant 
that Wine is not CX is not Cedega-- but... we're talking about often 
inexperienced people who are likely relying on Windows programs as a 
crutch to avoid the "confusingness" of Linux in the first place (the 
issue in question is easing migration woes, after all).

Such a user, when informed that CX is good for apps, and Cedega is good 
for games, might well install both, which is possible to do without 
problems, afaik (as they install in different places, and the wine or cx 
binaries and the cedega binaries do not have the same name).

So what's going to happen with the file associations on which the 
double-click strategy relies? Games are not distinguished from MSOffice 
in terms of being some other mime-type than "DOS/Windows executable".

Is CX going to try to open FarCry? Or is Cedega going to try to open 
Photoshop?

I really don't know (not having tried this), but I wonder, and suspect 
that it would bite me in the butt if I did try.

So while I do appreciate this functionality, I'm not sure it's flexible 
enough to cover the vast range of strange things that former Windows 
users might do (given that they're under the general impression that 
they can just click once and accomplish anything, no matter how complex 
or technically difficult-- through no fault of their own, I might add; 
they've just been sold a bill of goods, no pun intended).

Holly



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