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

[David Gerard]

2008/11/25 Foulkr <wineforum-user at winehq.org>:

> my thought is that the people that are complaining that the buttons and look of programs running in wine are the same ones that allow Microsoft to keep working on their GUI and not focusing on the kernel of their operating systems (anyone remember the talking paperclip in MSoffice?) They're worried about how pretty everythign is and not how it performs. hence the reason that Vista and xp never got rid of the infamous "blue-screen" error. hell when vista calls the screen in their error-logging a blue screen error. the only reason that wine currently exists is the lack of support from main stream distros building an operating version of their programs for linux operatiing systems (may be due to an abundance of distros) but if the people using linux started to use the open source versions available to everyone i.e. openoffice vs msoffice, kpdf vs adobe, etc... it would put a demand on the mainstream distros to start to adapt to at least the bigger distros for linux and provide support for the users running in a unix enviroment. Its all supply and demand, unfortunatly this time in reverse, they have the supply and we don't demand much of a change, we offer them our money instead of trying to force the change we want.


For current software, the objection is that Wine doesn't let things
stay exactly the same but with Unix underneath. How reasonable an
objection this is depends on the app - for example, the open-source
equivalents of Photoshop or AutoCAD really aren't substitutes on the
high-end professional level as far as the people working on that level
are concerned.

Lack of good support for .NET 2.0 and apps compiled against recent
VC++ is a reasonable problem to raise when the apps themselves are
open source! (e.g. AutoWikiBrowser, an open-source Wikipedia fast
editor which happens to be written against .NET 2.0).

Wine's killer app in my experience is running old stuff. That one
little Windows app that was keeping you running one Windows box just
to use it - and you can't even *find* the developer any more, let
alone ask them to do a Linux version. Wine runs those better and
better. Often better than XP does, almost always better than Vista
does.

Microsoft would like to keep Windows a moving target, but they're
hampered by their own need for extensive backward compatibility (c.f.
difficulty running old stuff in Vista or XP). So Wine can do better
catching up incrementally than one might expect.

At this stage I'm still more surprised when stuff doesn't Just Work in
Wine than when it does. Which is nice.


- d.