
Wine 2.0 released - coldpie
https://www.winehq.org/announce/2.0
======
dmerrick
I've been using computers my whole life, and a lot of the magic has been
explained away. Wine is a project that continues to astound me.

Grats to the Wine team, this is great!

~~~
mrmondo
Took the words out of my mouth. It's saved me from having to install complex
or insecure VMs or additional machines so many times I can't count. I also
enjoy using it to bundle applications usable on Linux and MacOS that otherwise
were locked in to windows.

~~~
duozerk
It's also a godsend for gaming on Linux. As long as you take a peek at the
wine appdb page for the game you're trying to run beforehand, they usually
work great and with pretty good performances.

Though granted the games I play tend not to be cutting edge (but for example,
Skyrim with a large texture pack and a full, heavy mod conversion such as
Enderal works perfectly and with CSMT, with performances roughly equal to
Windows).

~~~
bigbugbag
> It's also a godsend for windows gaming on Linux

here FTFY.

~~~
djsumdog
I'm pretty amazing at the Humble Bundle (DRM-free) and Steam selections for
Linux; not just independent titles but some larger ones too.

We've come a long way since Loki ports.

~~~
jhasse
Keep in mind that some of them are using libwine ;)

~~~
baldfat
And DOS-Box. GOG.com Masters of Orion 2 and many older games work great on it.

------
bartvk
The biggest commercial contributor to Wine is CodeWeavers:
[https://www.codeweavers.com/](https://www.codeweavers.com/)

Fantastic and very sympathetic small company which offers a next-next-finish
installation of Wine. Excellent if you run a Linux desktop in a corporate
environment that expects the ability to run Windows stuff.

~~~
a3_nm
Interestingly, CodeWeavers appears to be part of the reason in 2002 why Wine
changed its license from MIT to LGPL. They were concerned about the fact that
CodeWeaver's fork of Wine was proprietary.

(Sources:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_\(software\)#History)
[https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-
devel/2002-February/00...](https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-
devel/2002-February/003912.html))

CodeWeaver's Wine variant still seems to be proprietary according to Wikipedia
-- I wonder what made the relationship between CodeWeavers and Wine evolve.

~~~
coldpie
CodeWeavers's usage of Wine and other open-source projects has always been
open-source. You can download our Wine fork source from our website[1]. We do
use a small amount of closed-source glue to provide our installation magic and
desktop integration.

Wine switched to LGPL due to other proprietary forks.

[1] [https://www.codeweavers.com/products/more-
information/source](https://www.codeweavers.com/products/more-
information/source)

~~~
Fnoord
> Wine switched to LGPL due to other proprietary forks.

Specifically, WineX aka Cedega

------
jesuslop
Wine is a great project, and truly 'is not an emulator'. It takes the main
win32 APIs and they are reimplemented natively by posix means, GDI, USER32,
ADVAPI, and so on. Time ago I run an experiment to port Wine to windows and
run a notepad.exe on top of X11. After that I managed to wrap ActiveX
components inside GTK2 bonobo components served on windows to insert them into
Linux GTK apps so you could have UI-bound network transparent middleware
components, and it worked. Sadly de Icaza changed the arch later.

~~~
tzs
> Wine is a great project, and truly 'is not an emulator'.

The Wine is not an emulator thing has an interesting history. It originally
was officially called an emulator. The change was largely due to essentially
marketing.

The first suggestion for the "Wine Is Not an Emulator" language was made in
1993, over concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems
with Microsoft. That suggestion was by Bob Amstadt [1] in a post where he also
explained how the name "wine" came about. His original thought when he started
the project was to name it "winemu", but didn't like that and shortened it to
"wine", which led him to "whine" and "whinny". He liked "whine" but felt it
was too long.

As far as I can tell, nothing ever came of that 1993 post. By 1997, though,
the "not an emulator" meaning was in use as an alternative. According to the
Wine FAQ from late 1997 [2]: "The word Wine stands for one of two things:
WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever
one you like best".

Calling Wine an emulator was dropped between releases 981108 and 981211. The
981108 release notes [3] say "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows
emulator", and the 981211 release notes [4] say "This is release 981211 of
Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix".

The dropping of calling Wine an emulator appears to have taken place for two
reasons. One was that Wine could be used for more than just running Windows
binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library that could be linked with
Windows source that was compiled on Unix in order to make a stand-alone Unix
binary of a Windows program.

The other was that most users had only encountered emulators that emulated
hardware (e.g., emulators that emulated old gaming systems or old 8-bit
personal computers). Those emulators tended to be slow, which led most users
to make the unjustified assumption that emulation necessarily implied
slowness. If Wine was called an emulator many people would assume that
programs running under Wine would be massively slower than those same programs
running on a real Windows system. (I once had sources for the claims in this
and the preceding paragraph but did not save them, and have not been able to
rediscover them. They were probably posts in comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine in
the late '90s if anyone with better search skills wants to have a go at it).

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.linux.mis...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.linux.misc/_g3F2H4ieDc/1tN3XZODaYwJ)

[2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
wind...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
windows.wine/GOg6NAoNkg8/_jOvbogsh70J)

[3] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
wind...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
windows.wine/yYfTNV3Z2J0/fu4dtf_A2RcJ)

[4] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
wind...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-
windows.wine/tbMAhTg6GEs/tbBxEO4OtmEJ)

~~~
asperous
The "not an emulator" thing I think is good marketing but yeah kinda confusing
since it is essentially High-level emulation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
level_emulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation)

Interestingly that's how video game system console emulators after N64 got to
be so fast, my understanding is the core concept is they just convert the
machine instructions to x64 and do special linking to link the graphic calls
to hardware-accelerated APIs.

~~~
wtallis
Wine is at least distinct from emulators for recent consoles in that Wine is
purely HLE techniques, without a low-level emulation component (although there
was some work to integrate Wine and QEMU during the Mac Power PC days). Wine
works on the level of the dynamic loader to handle a foreign object file
format and intercept library calls, but all the machine code executes
natively.

~~~
alexbock
Use of Wine with QEMU was still a recurring topic even on Intel Macs (until
this release) because 64-bit Windows binaries use a calling convention that
isn't compatible with macOS.

~~~
yellowapple
It's also still a topic worth discussing in the context of ARM devices running
Linux (be it on a smartphone or a netbook or a single-board PC). There's also
the additional topic of whether or not Windows Mobile applications would be
worth running via a native ARM->ARM variant of Wine.

------
rijoja
This brings me back to the early days of my Linux usage. I've always been
fascinated by this project.

My _very nerdy_ dream has always been to try to contribute to it somehow. How
hard is it to get in to the community?

~~~
stuaxo
Another non development way to contribute is on the appdb, testing
compatibility -

[https://appdb.winehq.org/](https://appdb.winehq.org/)

~~~
bblough
Unless you run Debian stable (or probably any LTS distro), in which case they
don't want your reports because "your software is too out of date".

I find this attitude odd, because there are (at least) tens of thousands of
wine installs under Debian alone. Surely the information is relevant and
useful to people, even if the version is no longer officially supported.

As a result, I've stopped wasting my time filing reports only to have them
rejected.

~~~
voltagex_
Debian stable's Wine is often fairly old. I wish there was an easier way to
get a newer Wine on stable.

They're rejecting your reports because the issues are often fixed in newer
versions - someone would have to re-confirm your reports on a newer version.

~~~
RVuRnvbM2e
Uh, what? There's an up-to-date repository here:

[https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian](https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian)

~~~
Belphemur
Yes but not all the user would have it set up. They surely consider that the
majority of the users don't.

Maybe the policy about rejecting debian reports came way before they setup the
repository.

------
bandrami
Cool. I have to admit I haven't thought about Wine in a while because I can't
think of any software I use that doesn't have a Linux version. What are
people's use-cases nowadays?

~~~
ronjouch
Tag&Rename [1], a still maintained Windows-only shareware excellent at tagging
music. Occasional use, Linux equivalents suck in various ways, it's perfectly
configured to my needs, and works perfectly in Wine so why change it :)

[1] [http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm](http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm)

EDIT: thanks for the Linux alternative suggestions everyone! I have (had)
mostly the same complaints about ExFalso / Puddletag / EasyTAG as the ones I
posted below about Picard (never tried Beets though). But most importantly,
given this olde windows tool has been working fantastic for years, I don't see
any reason to migrate my config and trust and habits :)

~~~
brotherjerky
Let the computer do the work, I recommend beets which pulls Musicbrainz data:
[http://beets.io/](http://beets.io/)

~~~
flukus
>Let the computer do the work

I've had mixed success with this before when it comes to organizing media. Is
there any app which takes the middle ground of doing the work but letting the
user confirm?

~~~
breul99
Picard

------
shmerl
Kudos to Wine developers for their work. Hopefully in 2017 Wine will catch up
with DX11 support to make games like The Witcher 3 playable on Linux.

------
Cacti
What is the technical use case for Wine these days? Are we basically talking
running certain Windows applications on Linux, at reasonable framerates, using
hardware that doesn't support full virtualization pass-through? In other
words, if you've got virtualization support, and pcie pass-through support,
why not just run this stuff through a Windows VM?

~~~
shmerl
_> What is the technical use case for Wine these days?_

Gaming on Linux using Windows games is a widely common use case. Wine works
very well for most DX9 games already, but DX11 support is still quite WIP.

 _> if you've got virtualization support, and pcie pass-through support, why
not just run this stuff through a Windows VM?_

Because you don't want to run Windows? There can be multiple reasons for the
later.

~~~
gpderetta
I remember many years ago you at best had a chance to get opengl games working
under wine; getting anything directX working was a pipe dream.

Today most DirecX 9 games work flawlessly out of the box (including one click
install from steam, also running under wine).

~~~
shmerl
I use GOG installers, but yes, Wine today comparing to its early days is
simply amazing.

------
woodandsteel
My favorite Wine comment over the years:

"But does it run Cygwin?"

~~~
namtrac
Well yes it does:
[https://wiki.winehq.org/Cygwin_and_More](https://wiki.winehq.org/Cygwin_and_More)

------
cridenour
Excited to see Retina support in this release.

------
projektfu
A few years ago I was working on ReactOS and I found a bug in the list view
control. After working hard on a patch, I submitted it and heard nothing about
it. Have community relations improved since then?

~~~
coldpie
I'm sorry to hear that. In order to avoid regressions, we have pretty rigorous
requirements for patch submissions. Unfortunately this can result in dropped
patches, especially in subsystems that no one in particular feels responsible
for. We are trying to improve this, and we now ship a MAINTAINERS file that
will hopefully help with this, and are also actively spreading patch review
responsibilities around. I don't think we're significantly worse than most OSS
projects, but that doesn't mean we can't improve.

In terms of getting a patch accepted, your best move is to include tests that
prove your change is correct. Explaining how your change fixes an application
will also help.

~~~
projektfu
I did those things back then, but there just wasn't anyone listening on the
other end.

------
grovegames
Will this be able to run Photoshop CC? I am desperately trying to move most of
the production pipeline to linux, but Photoshop CC is the one product I can't
seem to replace. I've mitigated part of this with 3D-Coat, but if I could have
a native Photoshop CC on linux, it would be close to perfect.

~~~
deviantfero
I have photoshop CS6 working perfectly fine, just look around for a custom
installer that doesn`t connect to the internet, you should find it in any
pirate site

~~~
grovegames
I'm using the professionally, so legally is important. But thanks for the
suggestion.

------
partycoder
I have a lot of respect for the WINE developers. It is a tremendous effort to
implement an ABI to provide compatibility for a operating system such as
Windows.

------
dboreham
I still recall a fresh intern arriving in my office grinning and breathless
one day, talking about Wine. We discussed it a little and I told him "it'll
take a while before it achieves usable compatibility with major Windows
applications".

This was in 1993.

~~~
ant6n
It probably achieved compatibility with major Windows applications from 1993
some time ago.

------
orionblastar
Remember that ReactOS shares code with Wine. Which means when ReactOS uses the
code from Wine 2.0 it should be able to run more Windows apps.

------
excalibur
> The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the
> 64-bit support on macOS.

This made me chuckle. Better late than never I suppose.

~~~
deepuj
I havent used office in a many years now.. but I thought MS Office is now an
online offering similar to Google Docs?

~~~
pizzapill
Office 360. I dont use it myself but I heard its not comparable and does not
work without Internet Explorer...

~~~
ZenoArrow
365, not 360. Also, the online features aren't the main selling point of
Office 365, it's still predominantly a suite of desktop apps.

------
NotSteve
Any hope of playing Overwatch with this?

~~~
ronjouch
AppDB is the canonical resource for this kind of question:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/](https://appdb.winehq.org/)

-> Returns [https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17145) , which says it's currently classified "Garbage" as of 2.0-rc2.

~~~
aruggirello
BTW if you find you need multiple versions of Wine for better compatibility
with different apps (and probably even if you don't), PlayOnLinux is also a
great tool.

------
ww520
This is perfect for gaming VM. Installing Windows in a VM requires an extra
license. With Wine, I can install Linux in a VM and install Wine in it to run
Windows games. Anything blows up in the VM can be rolled back.

~~~
striking
Are you sure that's going to work? I don't think you'll be able to take full
advantage of your graphics hardware that way. (Last I checked, Virtualbox and
friends refused to allocate more than 256MB of VRAM... so I could play Duck
Game and no more.)

~~~
purplerabbit
Good question.

I was thinking it'd be fun to benchmark an application running on Windows vs.
that same application running on Wine running in the Ubuntu Userspace in
Windows. I'd have to guess it'd be at least a few times slower.

~~~
nerflad
That would make since, considering the overhead involved in translating the
syscalls twice. It would be really interesting to see if/how the native
Windows syscalls differed from the ones coming out of the Wine->WSL pipeline.

------
gravypod
I have been wondering something for a long time. Why do some programs work
_better_ on _specific_ versions of wine? I think that's what makes me feel
iffy about the entire project. I know it's amazing work but I just don't get
why that would happen.

~~~
coldpie
We're rewriting an entire operating system. We have a pretty amazing
regression test suite, but it's simply impossible to test everything all the
time. Sometimes a change breaks something and it slips through the tests. If
you find something that used to work and no longer does, please file a bug. We
take regressions seriously; we even have a page dedicated specifically to
tracking them:
[http://source.winehq.org/regressions](http://source.winehq.org/regressions)

------
pvdebbe
Wine has been good with the few Windows games that I play. (Dosbox with dos
games is better, but it has been crashing way too often with certain titles.)
Stuff works way better than in a VMWare box, games like Fallout, Jagged
Alliance 2, GTA 3, VC, SA, even 4 at times, Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, Rise
of Nations, most Needs for Speed.

Whatever glitches I get in Bethesda games, I google about them and quickly
find out the same issues happen in Windows environments as well.

I also run many games that have native Linux ports in wine, because it handles
sound better (pesky games these days presume I have a channel mixer set up)...
like Faster Than Light.

~~~
coldpie
Ha! Glad to hear it. I maintain the audio code in Wine :)

------
jpeeler
I remember years ago (5?) Google was releasing Picasa for Linux, except the
binaries were for Windows. Google had chosen to distribute it alongside a
bundled Wine installer! Aside from the general distaste in bundling things, I
was always impressed with how well Wine handled running applications.
Otherwise, surely such a decision wouldn't have been made.

If I'm not mistaken Google also contributed patches to make Wine work better,
but I don't know how critical the patches were.

------
doener
I could't get my Windows 10 installation on my iMac to run the 2004 game
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Tried it with Crossover for Mac (Wine
based) - and it worked.

------
jdc0589
my standard comment: "the wine team is comprised solely of sorcerers and
wizards".

I know its not, but sometimes Wine still seems like magic.

------
mukundmr
I use Wine to run the 64bit Windows client of GuildWars2 on my iMac. It is
more stable than the current GuildWars2 Mac client. Graphics performance isn't
upto par, but I need stability more for events and dungeons. ArenaNet is still
building a proper Mac client after Transgaming was taking over by NVidia.

------
andersonmvd
Wine saved my day to play my (Steam) games on Linux. It's not the same
performance on Windows and there are many opportunities to improve, but just
being able to play it's amazing.

------
pkrumins
It's time to celebrate! [https://comic.browserling.com/tux-
party.png](https://comic.browserling.com/tux-party.png)

------
transposed
Though I've made the switch from Windows to Linux, I have not used Wine. Maybe
it's time? What main things work and don't work?

------
mk89
What a great piece of software! Congratulations!

------
acd
Would Microsoft sell Winelibs or Windows for Linux now that there are Linux
for Windows?

~~~
ravenstine
That's actually a pretty neat idea. I'd much rather be running Windows on
Linux than Linux on Windows. Too bad they'll never do it.

------
chphipps
Wine is a great project. This brings me back to the early days of Linux!

------
ComodoHacker
>\- The Gecko engine is updated to the version from Firefox 47.

What is it used for?

~~~
majewsky
Some Windows programs use the Internet Explorer API to display local HTML
content or to provide an in-app browser. Gecko is used by the part of Wine
that provides this API.

------
singularity2001
Did anyone manage to navigate through the download jungle?

~~~
someguy101010
if you're on linux wine is a package available in most distributions and you
usually "sudo apt-get install wine"

*you're

~~~
bdcravens
Even available on Homebrew on OSX (doesn't yet have 2.0 final it appears)

~~~
apetresc
The pull request is up: [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-
core/pull/9238](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/9238)

Should be merged within 24 hours or so.

------
turbotronicks
Anyone able to use TurboTax successfully in Wine?

~~~
turbotronicks
Nevermind:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=623)

It's apparently unusable. But the DRM comment made me question using TurboTax
at all even on a Windows machine.

------
turboted
Anyone able to use TurboTax successfully on Wine?

------
z3roblock
I've been waiting so long !

Good work Wine team.

------
bedros
any luck with lightroom 6.0 on linux with this release?

------
z3roblock
Ive been waiting for so long!

