winecfg - great job!

Zachary Goldberg zgold at bluesata.com
Mon Oct 27 14:07:12 CDT 2008


On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Eric Anopolsky <erpo41 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just read the following in the WWN:
>
> "The overall 'Wine Experience' was discussed next. As a whole everybody
> agrees that it is ugly. Winecfg is arcane, there are tons of nonsense
> fixmes, very little 'newbie guidance' and overall a small chance of
> success on the first try. Devs do care about this but its just not as
> much fun to fix."
>

The point was perhaps a bit over exaggerated. Wine isn't bad, we love
Wine.  However in this day and age we're working harder and harder to
make all of Linux accessible to the completely computer untrained and
illiterate.  And unfortunately thus far Wine is a bit tricky for that
population.

We hope to be able to do more in the future, and I think since that
article we slowly have.  There has been a bunch of discussion about
changing winecfg and a number of patches submitted.   There has also
been a lot of work to silence noisy fixmes etc.

> Don't be so hard on yourselves! Remember when we had to write a
> text-based configuration file with no help other than documentation?
> What percentage of the computer-using public reads documentation?
>
> I can say something like, "Diablo II will not run fullscreen on my
> computer. You have to set it to use an emulated desktop before you
> launch it or it will crash. You can do that using the 'Configure Wine'
> program on the 'Wine' menu," to my non-Linux-using girlfriend and she
> can figure out how to run Diablo II without additional help, and without
> knowing anything ahead of time about emulated desktops. It's just a
> checkbox and it just works.
>
> You all are doing a great job! :)
>
> Cheers,
> Eric
>

-Zach



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