
Wine 1.8 is released - coldpie
https://www.winehq.org/announce/1.8
======
Nutmog
I recently used Wine on Ubuntu and was amazed how smoothly it just worked.
Download an msi Windows installer and open it just like you would in Windows.
The program installs just like on Windows, and runs from its own icon just
like in Windows. You hardly need to think about the fact that it's not
Windows. Understandably there were a few compatibility problems but having it
so well integrated into the UI was a surprise. It's perhaps almost good enough
that you don't need to port your Windows application to Linux anymore. Just
avoid the broken functionality. As a Windows programmer, I now keep Wine
compatibility in mind when deciding to use new features and libraries and will
be trying to remove incompatible code.

~~~
rcthompson
Interesting. Is that just Wine itself, or does Ubuntu/GNOME/whoever have some
special sauce that facilitates the seamless desktop integration?

~~~
FatalBaboon
No real special sauce, but you have winetricks which has a few things to help
solve common problems, and then winehq.org to see if others made a particular
software/game on Linux.

I've found it to work remarkably well with games. Basically install Steam from
Wine and then install Steam games like you normally would. It mostly just
works.

I also installed and played "Path of Exile" through Wine with no problems.
It's a fast, online hack 'n slash where if I died I would have to start over
tens of hours of gameplay and Wine never let me down on latency or anything.

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allan_s
Thanks a lot to the team for these improvements

As a normal man, in addition to the technical changelog, what would be
interesting for me to have is a list of software that can now be run by wine,
or that have a significantly improved experience with this version compare to
1.7

~~~
bcrescimanno
Given the way Wine versioning works, I wouldn't expect any significant changes
from the latest 1.7.x cycle. Wine uses the same versioning system that Linux
used prior to (and perhaps after, I'm not sure) the 3.0 release. The second
number represents a stable version if it's even or an unstable development
version if it's odd. Odd releases are used to "build up" new features towards
an even-numbered release.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
That convention/development model was dropped with Linux 2.6. Current Linux is
essentially still the 2.6 series. Linus just felt silly having the same major
version number for ~8 years and has switched to incrementing it whenever the
fancy strikes him.

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sawwit
I'm frequently surprised that wine just works even with the most obscure and
odd programs, e.g. exe packed Flash SWFs and programs with weird custom GUIs.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Flash Player redistributables aren't really obscure, they're all the same
program, so I'd imagine WINE would support it well.

~~~
sawwit
Fair point. I somehow was under the false impression that no one ever uses
these Flash Player projectors, but it seems to have been supported for a long
time according to the WINE app DB. Still awesome. =D

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shekhar101
Great work by Wine team. I use Wine for a lot of Windows application but I
could never make Office (2010 and later) work on Ubuntu. If I can somehow do
that, probably I would never switch back to Windows. Open Office/Libre office
is frustrating and so are most online word replacements.

~~~
doener
Office 2010 should run under the commercial version of Wine dubbed Crossover:
[https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof...](https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-
office-2010)

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MrBra
To those using it: did it happen to you at least once to find out that a
specific application (or game) you really needed did not work with Wine? What
was it?

~~~
justabystander
Games are great and everything, but I'm still hoping for Visual Studio
support. Ever since MS switched to a WPF-style UI (2010 and newer), it's been
unusable. Here's the status for VS 2015 as of 1.7.49:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=32486)
.

If I could get this, I could run Linux on all of my work dev machines. But I'm
pretty sure the day this works is rather far away. Thankfully, people like
Anastasius Focht have been extremely helpful in dealing with related issues.

~~~
MrBra
Isn't it more realistic to expect that Visual Studio will be made binary-
available by Microsoft itself on Linux or even open sourced at some time given
the latest Microsoft turnarounds?

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giancarlostoro
One thing I'd like to note that some may not realize but ReactOS is based in
part on Wine[0], so any improvements to Wine will likely find themselves to
ReactOS where possible.I mention this because there was a recent post about
ReactOS[1].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10746799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10746799)

------
lukevers
Nice! I'm excited to try out the 64bit support on OSX. Thank you to everyone
that works on this!

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cookiecaper
WINE is an amazing project. Big kudos to the team at CodeWeavers and all
contributors.

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heinrich5991
Native Pulseaudio support. Thank you!

~~~
anonbanker
Wine has Native JACK support. just install jack, and make pulsaudio its slave.

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MrBra
What part of Windows would need to be made open in order to get a 100% Windows
binary compatibility on Linux?

~~~
zanny
Windows binaries using win32.dll are working pretty universally nowadays. Even
WinRT is pretty much implemented. Its all system support libraries and opening
up Windows would not make the implementations come faster besides having
better access to finding the bugs in the documented API that many programs
expect.

For example, DX11 being opened up doesn't matter because it relies on the
Windows driver model while Wine is translating HLSL and D3D calls to OpenGL,
or Gallium-Nine is translating them to TGSI. Opening up most system libraries
doesn't work, because they are all using Windows kernel primitives the Linux
kernel won't have.

The complexity of Wine is more that Windows is a 30 year old maze of
complexity with millions of independent APIs and callbacks implemented over
the years without rhyme or reason, and a Windows exe can call any of them any
time and get anything back because the APIs are anything but bugfree. You need
to translate Windows soup to Posix soup and somehow get all the expected
behavior the running program needs, and then on the backend they are
supporting pretty much every non-Windows OS so they have to fight with all
their targets quirks.

~~~
MrBra
> millions of independent APIs and callbacks implemented over the years
> without rhyme or reason, and a Windows exe can call any of them any time

Do you have a typical good example for this?

So, genuine question, are you suggesting that if Microsoft decided to do
something about this, that would pretty much have to rewrite it from scratch?

~~~
zanny
[http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls](http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls)

These are all the system libraries Wine has reimplemented so far, and thats
only up to its current near-DX10 support, and these libraries are just the
base - most applications can ship their own copies of Windows libraries, but
as long as the core libraries everything else depends upon work you can run
other libs on top of them.

But a lot of Windows has been reimplemented between the old 3.1 era and now,
and not just the kernel - MS has maintained fair backwards compatibility the
whole say so new versions of the same API can be dramatically different in
implementation.

If Microsoft wanted to support Windows executables on Unix they would need to
just pick up where Wine is at now and continue their work, albeit with insider
access to code to know all the edge cases of their own implementations of
these APIs, since software is written against the bugs.

------
chei0aiV
Anyone know if there is a way to run MacOS X or iOS apps on Linux?

~~~
mburns
Darling: [https://www.darlinghq.org/](https://www.darlinghq.org/)

Previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171925)

