Canonical and wine

Zachary Goldberg zgold at bluesata.com
Wed Dec 10 14:42:56 CST 2008


> On Wednesday 10 December 2008 19:09:16 Dan Kegel wrote:
> http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/65431.html
> quotes Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical:
> "We aren't considering a pitch about using Wine or Parallels like on a
> Mac. There is no real look at Wine. It doesn't always work well. So
> this won't win over users to the benefits of Linux,"
>
> So there you go.  Canonical will think about Wine once it always works
> well.

I agree with Canonical that perhaps it doesn't make sense to make a
Winebuntu or a new Ubuntu with Wine as a bigger focus for exactly that
reason, it doesn't work for everything and that isn't a great
experience.  (Anything thats inconsistent is bad for something like
Ubuntu.  We love Wine but fact is fact, it isn't univerally perfect so
they can't advertise 'Full Windows Application Support!' etc. etc.
They could advertise 'Will Work with Some Windows Apps!' but then
users ask which ones and it gets confusing from there and yada
yada...)

However perhaps it does make more sense to think about using Wine for
application specific scenarios.

I believe it has been proposed before to have .debs for things like
Adobe Photoshop which first install Wine (or create a new prefix etc.)
and then ask for the Photoshop CD; sort of like application specific
bundlings of Wine.

Do we know Canonical's stance on that?  That scenario could be
consistent and provide real end user benefit sans confusion.



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