[Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

[Ben Klein]

2009/5/19 Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine.
>> 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported.
>> 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine
>> 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.
>
> You forgot:
> 5. ????
> 6. Profit!

Off-topic, but that only works with 3-stage plans, thus:
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine
2. ?
3. Profit!

"Time to go to work, work on Wine, work on opensource today! We won't
stop until we've got opensource, yum yum yummy yum yay!"

Back on topic, do we really take such strongly biased blog crap from
zdnet seriously? The author has done little to no research:
"Which brings us to today. Linux desktops have reached a point of
maturity, polish and sophistication which rivals that found in Windows
2000. Yes, it's not as integrated as XP nor as glittering as Mac OS X.
But it's Good Enough™. What Linux cannot offer to most potential
users, that critical attribute which presently holds Linux back from
much broader adoption on the desktop, is that magical ingredient which
Windows offered to DOS users; being able to all your important
applications within the new environment."
^^ missing a word here ("being able to all your important
applications"). Note that MacOSX also fails to bring this
functionality, but it's not being hammered like Linux is.

I've recently seen the OpenSUSE 11.1 installer in action and, although
Debian is still my preferred distro, I am very impressed. It's all
pretty and snazzy, and YAST has come a long way since I first tried
SUSE. Maybe this is just because Novell bought it, but it's certainly
way beyond the "Windows 2000" level he's claiming.

"Wine is still a work-in-progress and a pain to configure. It
therefore pays to purchase a nicely-packaged form of this open source
technology from one of two vendors: for business apps, CrossOver
Office from Codeweavers, and for gamers, WineX from Transgaming, Cost
is maybe $50, but it will make installing and managing all those
Windows apps under Linux a snap."

For a start, *Cedega* is a subscription service ...

"How to make the vineyard bloom? There are four major industry players
(IBM, Sun, Red Hat and Novell) who have a vested interest in desktop
Linux's success, and therefore much to gain by cultivating the open
source developer community which produces Wine. At the moment Wine is
growing organically; slow and steady. With some well directed nutrient
booster, say in the form of $10 million apiece, Wine will be running
99% of all those thousands of Windows apps within a year."

This makes me LOL. Somehow I don't think money is the problem.

First comment too, only way to go forward is for someone to buy
Codeweavers (and potentially taint Crossover/Wine for the purposes of
getting things to work).