
Wine 1.7.12 Released - userulluipeste
http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.7.12
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YokoZar
I've been the Ubuntu developer responsible for Wine's packages for almost a
decade now.

Over the years I've encountered a lot of skepticism about Wine, with some
people even wondering if we'd be better off without it existing. I've never
been convinced.

I hear an incredible number of stories about people who wanted to use Ubuntu,
but couldn't because of one Windows app. Increasingly, I hear the inverse --
people who are happily using Ubuntu now because Wine works well enough.

Data is hard to come by, but my best estimates put Wine's install base at
something on the order of 10-25% of Ubuntu users. That means millions of users
of my packages. Most are running games. Some use it for some sort of critical
business function like a legacy app.

I've contracted with a good number of companies who use Wine for critical
business purposes. Wine is quickly becoming the porting tool of choice for
making Mac and Linux versions of Windows software -- often times the game will
work without modification, and when it doesn't these days it is dramatically
cheaper to improve Wine than to rewrite applications.

I do understand some of the skepticism though. A single bug can render an
application completely unusable, so from a user's perspective it's very hard
to tell whether Wine is 99% done or 5% done. But in the future, you won't even
know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be powering your steam games.

~~~
BlackDeath3
>But in the future, you won't even know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be
powering your steam games.

Do you mean it'll be powering Windows-native Steam games, or that Wine is
somehow related to the Linux version of Steam?

~~~
dippyskoodlez
I think he's referring to developers making a quick port using Wine as a
wrapper similar to Cider.

Cider sucks, though.

~~~
YokoZar
Yes, this is what I meant. Cider does suck, because Cider is based on a
proprietary fork of a 7 year old branch of the Wine code and couldn't keep
pace with the open source version. There's a reason Transgaming abandoned
Cedega as a consumer product, and it's been that free Wine has been vastly
superior for a while.

Codeweavers has already moved into the porting space using their expertise
around free Wine, and perhaps not surprisingly Transgaming has begun to pivot
into completely different areas.

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mildtrepidation
Honest question: What do people use Wine for? The only thing I ever tried
under it was games, and for that it was... meh. I'm assuming my experience was
sub-par because my expectations were unreasonable.

But I'd really like to know whether people are actually effectively using
things like Office with Wine or whether there's some Door Number Three that
I'm just not seeing.

~~~
AndyKelley
An open source project I contribute to uses wine in a pretty cool way I think.
Actually it's mentioned in these wine release notes - LMMS.

It's a music production studio, and one of the features that it offers is to
use a VST instrument. A VST instrument is a .dll file which provides a virtual
instrument for the user to use in their music project. So here we have this
native linux app but it is able to take advantage of .dll plugins using wine.

~~~
fuzzix
Aren't there licensing issues around the VST SDK which means LMMS rarely ships
with VST functionality built in?

I tried building it with VST support once, not exactly seamless - not sure I
ever got it to work.

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wrl
There's a clean-room reimplementation that LMMS ships with called VeSTige.
Ardour3 also uses said code for VST hosting.

The effort isn't complete (they didn't re-implement all the corners), but it
works well enough.

~~~
fuzzix
Ah, thanks for the info, must check it out.

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daniel_iversen
I use Wine on and off, so much that I bought the CrossOver app that's built on
Wine.. I use it on Mac to run windows-only programs for work like Microsoft
Project, Microsoft Visio and a small desktop tool we wrote a Lon time ago. I
think Wine is amazing but must admit that one day it's use will probably be
obsolete (there are alternatives to the Microsoft programs that are more or
less "good enough").

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broodbucket
I think that when Wine was originally started, the goal must have been for it
to be obsolete one day. That day is still very far away, and regardless, Wine
is a technical marvel.

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davidgerard
No. Win32 programs will be around approximately _forever_.

Win32 will be one of those "forever" technologies. Like COBOL and now Java.

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hammerandtongs
I'm really pleased to see the activity level in Wine.

It's clearly a long struggle with a horrible beast but they are brave souls
for doing it.

I think this will all be increasingly significant with Steambox coming along
so nicely.

Wine, for example, can play Planetside2 which is probably the one game that
would keep me from getting rid of Windows over the longer term.

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rocky1138
I played Max Payne the whole way through a few years ago on Mandriva. Worked a
treat. I ended up buying a Crossover license as well.

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pjscott
Congratulations! Wine's existence continues to be superior to its
nonexistence. I can't say it's ever been _convenient_ to use, but switching
operating systems has always been at least slightly worse.

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boohoofoodoo
Blizzard games on Ubuntu desktop, they all work perfectly.

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MPSimmons
I look at the list of bug fixes, and I can't help but think that this is a
losing battle, and that there are much more worthy projects that the concerted
efforts of these undeniably skilled developers could be building.

~~~
yogo
I have to agree. I think it's a great, and much needed, project but I
discovered that just beefing up my hardware a little and running Windows on
VirtualBox was cheaper in the end. Many applications don't work out of the
box, and require all sorts of twists and turns to get them working, if at all
possible.

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a3_nm
> running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end

"cheaper"? Wine is free software, whereas to run Windows you need a Windows
license.

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nikbackm
Your time is never "free".

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a3_nm
Time and money are not seamlessly convertible at all, so, if this was the
intended meaning of the comment, I think "cheaper" is misleading in comparison
with e.g. "faster", "easier", "more efficient", "less time-consuming"...

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cordite
Plenty of EVE online fixes. I wonder what their distribution of users is..

~~~
dippyskoodlez
I think having developer "support" helps motivation and I wouldn't be
surprised if some contribute.

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ausjke
With virtualbox and its alternatives it's really hard for me to find a reason
to use Wine, and yes I do not play games under Linux. Anyone can list some
main usages for Wine?

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memracom
On OS/X I tried

sudo port install wine

and it works! Of course I already have Macports installed, but this could be
interesting to runs Windows apps alongside Mac apps.

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TheOsiris
wow! I didn't know this thing is still around. At this point, doesn't it make
sense to make OSXE? I know it's not as catchy as WinE, so how about OXE?

Kidding aside, I think the world needs an iOSE on windows and linux

~~~
wsc981
There's a project in the works, but I don't know how active it is. It's called
Darling (DARwin on LINux):
[http://www.darlinghq.org](http://www.darlinghq.org)

