[Wine] Re: The single major remaining Wine complaint everyone makes...

[msclrhd]

I am a huge fan of Wine and have started contributing to it over the past year. With every new release it seems that more and more things work and that is a remarkable achievement. The fact that *any* (as in at least one) Windows application works at all on Linux is amazing.

That said, there are still things that don't work and a lot of stuff that is unimplemented. The task gets even harder with every release of Windows when they add even more functionality.

I am a Windows GUI developer by trade and am an avid keyboard user. If something does not look right, or work well with the keyboard, I am *well* aware of that. One of my goals is to improve the look and feel/usability of Wine as a whole, and is on the radar of other developers as well. Given that, I prefer a system that *works* and is stable, and will tolerate the odd quirk if it does not crash.

Wine does not have an army of developers like Windows does, which usually means that how the UI looks and behaves is not a priority. There are also technical challenges like optimising the DIB graphics engine, which will improve 2D performance on games and other apps that do extensive 2D graphics (this is on the CodeWeavers teams agenda to be fixed).

Another area is the look of the system when you install and use a Windows theme (such as the Zune theme). This is something that annoys me, but there are technical issues to get the buttons and other controls themed correctly. I would also like the window frame themed correctly when Windows draws it.