How to phrase Wine's success rate

[Dan Kegel]

On 5/25/08, Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg231 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about this for more positive yet realistic phrasing:
> > "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about half work well
> > enough to try, and of those, half work well enough to use routinely.
> > In particular, Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and many
> > small apps run very well.  .NET based apps and Photoshop CS3
> > are not yet supported."
>
> That just sounds more confusing...
>
> Is "percent of apps we tested" a formal release criterion for Wine 1.0 ?

No.

> If not, the stats seem irrelevant as far as this release is concerned.

Here's how it's relevant: if we just say "Wine 1.0 is great!  Try it!",
people will try it, find it doesn't work for three quarters of their apps,
and conclude that Wine sucks.  We want to avoid that by owning
the issue, and informing people in advance that not all apps work.

> If you want to set realistic expectations - list major supported apps along
> with a link to appdb called "Will my app work under WINE?".  Then the users
> will have a realistic expectation of whether their individual apps work.

The appdb does not have complete or accurate information, and
lots of people won't even bother to find their app in it.
While we should indeed link to it, we should also give people
an overall idea of how well Wine works.

> Setting realistic expectations with a rather low percentage number just
> means a lot of people won't even bother trying.

Better that than they try it and conclude that it sucks.

One more try:
"Wine 1.0 runs apps like Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2,
and a thousand other apps (see http://appdb.winehq.org) well.
Try it on your favorite app and see if it works for you; the smaller
the app, the more likely it is to work well.
Photoshop CS3 and .NET applications are not yet supported.
Wine is continually improving, and many apps that didn't work well last year
work well now.  Overall, about one in four apps tested work well as of
Wine 1.0.  See the Wine FAQ (http://wiki.winehq.org) for more info."

- Dan