Interesting Insights Into Wine's Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Interesting Insights Into Wine's Development

Wine, the widely-known open-source software for running Microsoft Windows programs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, now weighs in at more than three million lines of code. In this article is some insight into its pace of development, how the CodeWeavers company dominates Wine's development, and other intriguing statistics about this project that's been around for two decades...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI3OTg

[V!NCENT]

Julian probably has the most knowledge about the most used operating system on the planet. (on consumer PCs) He then also managed to link all that to Linux and MacOS X, so he needs to have deep knowledge about Linux and MacOS X as well.

Doesn't that make him an uber geek?

[BO$$]

For me Wine works only for simple windows applications. Anything more and it gives weird errors or doesn't even load. So no. He would have been an uber geek if it worked.

[Rigaldo]

For me Wine works only for simple windows applications. Anything more and it gives weird errors or doesn't even load. So no. He would have been an uber geek if it worked.

Have you tried "PlayOnLinux"?

[BO$$]

Have you tried "PlayOnLinux"?

Isn't it just a frontend for wine? I mean if it doesn't work with wine why should I expect it to work with PlayOnLinux?

[Hamish Wilson]

For me Wine works only for simple windows applications. Anything more and it gives weird errors or doesn't even load. So no. He would have been an uber geek if it worked.

To be fair just being to launch anything is a pretty impressive accomplishment. I have also had a lot of trouble with WINE, but I am not necessarily going to hold it against Julian. My main complaint with WINE though is the amount of breakages it has - the current version I am using the sound does not work and winecfg has severe GUI redraw problems.

[Rigaldo]

Isn't it just a frontend for wine? I mean if it doesn't work with wine why should I expect it to work with PlayOnLinux?

It finds a Wine version known to be compatible(but you can easily change it afterward to experiment if you want) and makes all the tweaks for you.
I got MS Office to work perfectly with this, while I couldn't with plain Wine(but I changed to more recent Wine version to get rid of a bug in PowerPoint). And even a couple games I tried.
You might have more trouble getting a video to play the way you want through the command line with let's say MPlayer than you would with a fronte-end presenting the option you have in an easily accessible way. Here it's even worse ..
Wine doesn't exactly work out of the box(although it pretty much did with, let's say, Skyrim, but low performance, at least on AMD, still), but it usually does work.

[Ericg]

Isn't it just a frontend for wine? I mean if it doesn't work with wine why should I expect it to work with PlayOnLinux?

PlayOnLinux is more like CrossOver in that it can set up specific wine directories per application with app-specific overrides. So if wine 1.5.22 breaks MS Office 2010, PlayOnLinux can set it up to that MS Office 2010, and only MS Office 2010, has a wine setup that is actually 1.5.21.

Its more than just "a frontend."

[Vadi]

I think it would be more appropriate to say that Codeweaves "funds" moreso than "dominates". For this reason I get Crossover as well instead of Wine (plus their customer support is great, no more hunting around forums trying various hacks).

[not.sure]

Wine usually has been working quit nice for many years, and for many things.

However, what really bugs me is when in order to get your fav game working you need that one-liner fix (literally!), and for that you need to recompile the whole shebang. In a 32bit chroot. With hundreds of -dev packages. And nightmares.
And when there's a new version, the patch isn't intergrated, but just needs to be applied to a different line number. And you have to do it all again. sigh