
Wine 1.6 Released With 10,000 Changes - conductor
http://www.winehq.org/news/2013071801
======
nemesisj
Is there any more impressive open source project than Wine? I mean, yes, the
Linux kernel itself and maybe GCC, but Wine just blows me away. The sheer
audacity of sitting down and deciding to reimplement the entire Win32 stack
_including_ bugs to the point where DirectX is reimplemented in OpenGL and
everything runs natively is just unbelievable. It's truly a testament to open
source. No business would initially fund a project like this, it's nuts. And
yet it exists, and continues to improve, and now companies like Codeweavers
are built upon it. Congrats!

~~~
evilpie
Have you seen [http://reactos.org/](http://reactos.org/) ? The are
reimplementing the whole Windows NY system, with the help of wine actually.

~~~
LeeLorean
ReactOS is great, but the project seems to have died in the last few years.

~~~
tuananh
dead? the last trunk build is today!

~~~
PuercoPop
Yeah it is not dead. He probably got that impression from the stall they got
when they had to do a massive code audit

------
ZeroMinx
Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting
for a free, open OS, remember?

I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the
shit Apple are doing. I do understand that "normal" people love Apple, but I
just can not understand why coder people, who grew up learning to code in a
GNU world (like me) can succumb to go Apple.

~~~
dkulchenko
I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching
to a MacBook Air running OS X.

I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining
my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros'
improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to
paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never
having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's
worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many
others on HN.

(This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run
Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)

~~~
azakai
> I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in
> maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work.

I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it
just works.

I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That
might be just anecdotal, of course.

~~~
ghswa
I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment
would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother,
that's a very important part of "just works".

~~~
YokoZar
If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the
next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5
years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.

~~~
ghswa
Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant
catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes
to the UI rather than one big overhaul.

My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window
buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many
users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity.

My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer
"changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any
Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.

~~~
wiredfool
I feel like 10.04 was a real high point -- I was running it the desktop for a
long while, and the netbook edition was great on smaller screens. The netbook
shell was a one off, it only was 10.04, and I think it's nearly impossible to
install now. Unity was a descendent of it, but (IMHO) going the wrong way.

------
sciurus
Wine 1.6 has major improvements for OS X.

"\- A native Mac OS X driver is implemented, for better integration with the
Mac desktop environment. The full range of driver features are supported,
including OpenGL, window management, clipboard, drag & drop, system tray, etc.

\- X11 is no longer needed on Mac OS X, but the X11 driver is still supported,
e.g. when running remotely."

~~~
brymaster
Ken Thomases from CodeWeavers has done a great job implementing the winemac
driver. It's getting a lot better with each release but there are still some
performance issues compared to X11, so I wouldn't dump X11 just yet if you
have a stable app using it.

------
DigitalSea
The Wine project has always impressed me and seeing all of these wonderful
changes just keeps impressing me more. Take a look at that list of graphical
and audio changes? Whoa. VMR-9 video rendering support, the slew of Direct3D
additions and strengthening of the implementations of some of the features,
better networking support including NTLM and negotiate authentication protocol
support.

Refraining from going into full fanboy mode, but I hope the Wine project gets
to the point where one day any Windows app can run with an almost guaranteed
inside of the Linux operating system. The day I can run Adobe Creative Suite 6
from within Ubuntu basically bug free is the day I ditch Windows completely
for Linux.

~~~
userulluipeste
Some Windows apps will never run on Wine due to the scope of the emulation,
but you might someday run them on ReactOS which uses Wine and takes over where
Wine stops.

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csense
> Internationalized domain names [1]

Does anyone know how this works in general?

It seems like an invitation to severe cybersquatting to allow someone to
register e.g. goógle.com. I know those marks mean something in non-English
languages, but for me (and I suspect most English speakers) it's very easy to
mistake for dust on the monitor those symbols that Europeans insist on putting
over their letters, like "`" or "'" or [[cos(90), sin(90)], [-sin(90),
cos(90)]] * ":" [2] or other weird symbols that I don't even know how to type
because they aren't linear transformations of ASCII characters.

[1] [http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.6](http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.6)

[2] [http://xkcd.com/184/](http://xkcd.com/184/)

~~~
Groxx
\-- disclaimer: this is old info and I never got too deep into it, so take it
with a (big) grain of salt :) and please, correct me if I'm wrong somewhere!

From what I can remember of some of Chrome's and Firefox's battles with this,
one of the end-states was something like this, using punycode (example here[1]
seems more useful than the wikipedia page[2]):

If system language matches domain name's language, display in localized
characters. Otherwise, display punycode, to prevent homoglyph attacks.

"domain name's language" is of course a very vague definition. A better one
might be "same UTF section". And it's all hairy and a bit problematic and I
don't recall any conclusive, ideal solutions, and somewhat doubt it's
possible. But handling the vast majority of legitimate uses in the best-
possible way while preventing homoglyph attacks is pretty darned good.

And yeah, there will be sin/cosine/theta/pi.com attempts. But having an un-
typable name is a choice made by the domain owner, just like any other.
There's nothing preventing me from buying fdaocclasuro--
ieja83q92e-jfksdl7a.com, which is at least as obtuse as any punycode URL, but
that hasn't been a complaint in the past.

[1] [http://mothereff.in/punycode](http://mothereff.in/punycode) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode)

~~~
dfc
_And yeah, there will be sin /cosine/theta/pi.com attempts_

I apologize for being thick skulled but I do not understand what you are
referring to and I did not understand that similar statement in the comment to
which you replied. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance for explaining something to me that everyone else seems to
have no problem understanding.

~~~
Groxx
No problem :) I mean that people will buy / try to buy π.com, Θ.com, ☃.com,
and even 🍤.com (pi, theta, snowman, and fried shrimp characters, if you can't
see them). It's inevitable. Even though you can't really type them, people
will buy them because they're weird / unique / well recognized. I'm merely
saying it's not a problem.

~~~
dfc
Thank you for your reply. I was fixated on the equation (and xkcd image) from
the original comment at the expense of overlooking "weird symbols that I don't
even know how to type."

------
FooBarWidget
Now that Apple has abandoned Carbon and Rosetta, I can use Wine to play
Starcraft 1 on my Mac.

~~~
barbs
Shameless plug: I wrote a blog-post detailing how to do exactly that using
Wineskin:

[http://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/how-to-play-
classic...](http://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/how-to-play-classic-
blizzard-games-on-mac-os-x-mountain-lion/)

Not sure how the improved driver for Mac makes this better or worse.

~~~
nwh
Out of curiosity, does multiplayer work? My main concern is LAN/Battle.net.

~~~
barbs
Worked for me.

Battle.net is a little shakey. Make sure to follow the steps to install fonts,
or it won't work at all. Also, it'll probably look really funny (textures
won't load properly), but it'll be functional.

------
unsignedint
I use wine with PlayOnLiunx
[http://www.playonlinux.com/en/](http://www.playonlinux.com/en/) and I find
it's quite usable. (PlayOnLinux makes it easy to setup different wine
environment each with different parameters.)

------
angersock
Changelog here:

[http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.6](http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.6)

------
outworlder
Now that I've switched mostly to OSX, and with many apps moved to "the cloud"
and virtual machines, Wine is getting rapidly irrelevant (to me!).

However, I wonder if a project similar to Wine will be needed in a few years,
to run OSX applications.

~~~
csense
Isn't Mac these days a UNIX-like OS on x86? What happens if you just move a
Mac binary to a Linux machine (with all its dependencies) and try to run it?

I'm assuming it'll break, but what difference between the two OS's makes it
break?

~~~
keeperofdakeys
To put it simply, it would take about the same effort to port a Linux
application to Mac as it would to Windows. Everything talks differently, and
you have to adapt for that.

~~~
duaneb
I'm gonna stop you there—this isn't true. Yes, the interfaces are completely
different, but if you can sidestep that (command line tools, games go directly
to OpenGL), the systems are very compatible. I've written a LOT of hairy code
that is perfectly compatible and would be straightforward to emulate.

------
jmgrosen
What's the best way to use Wine on OS X?

~~~
csense
Reformat your hard drive and install Linux Mint.

~~~
DigitalJack
I haven't tried mint, but Ubuntu is a crap experience on my mac. I had it on a
separate partition for a while, but I just couldn't stand all the graphical
glitching.

I work in linux all day long, but i love osx. I have never, ever, thought to
myself, "man, I wish I was running linux."

To be fair, while at work, I never think "I wish this was osx" either.

~~~
thejosh
I use Ubuntu 13.04 on my work iMac (mid 2011, as I recall, i7 / 16GB RAM) as
my OS, with LXDE.

Previous to 13.04 Ubuntu acted very strange and had a multitude of problems.
Since 13.04, and with ATI finally having proper drivers it works really well.

~~~
nirvdrum
Does that have the broken EFI implementation? I only tried to boot linux on a
MacBook Pro (17" unibody, 2011 I think) and while it worked, it was pretty
annoying. Since the EFI implementation was non-standard, I had to boot with
some BIOS emulation layer that started my SSD in IDE mode (slower), prevented
proper sleep (forced to do a full shutdown whenever moving locations), and
reduced battery life from 6.5 hours to about 2.

If all that's a thing of the past, that'd be excellent news.

------
cpeterso
16 months is a long development cycle for an open source project. Has the Wine
project considered smaller, faster releases? I imagine they need a lot of test
time to find subtle compatibility regressions because there are so many crappy
Windows applications that depend on Windows quirks and misfeatures.

~~~
gizmo686
I'm not part of Wine, but it seems like their project is uniquely vulnerable
to regressions. They not only need to write their software correctly, but they
need to write their bugs correctly as well. Unfortunately, their is no good
way to test for these regressions other than time.

~~~
YokoZar
Well, not exactly -- there's an enormous unit test suite, and most changes
come with associated tests to prove correctness (tests, in turn, are deemed
correct by automatically running them on a dozen different versions of
windows).

Regressions still happen, of course -- we might not be testing the right
thing, or we might hit an edge case where implementing something completely
correctly caused an application to break that was secretly relying on one wine
bug hiding another wine bug.

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b0rsuk
My long-time observation is that compatibility is one of areas where open
source really shines. Wine is a highly successful project, and so is Dosbox.
OpenOffice, LibreOffice go to great lengths to achieve .doc compatibility.
While OSS tends to suffer in creativity department (you mostly get free X -
free photoshop-like program, free Word, FreeCiv, countless Quake1 clones, and
heaps of "clone" games), compatibility of OSS is unmatched.

------
dmix
I just moved to (arch) linux from OSX, whats it like running photoshop via
wine? Is it usable? I've yet to try it.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Latest version of Photoshop (CS6) has Gold status which means it runs
reasonably well. To check the status of any application or game, a quick
search through the WineHQ App Database does the trick:
[http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...](http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&sTitle=Browse%20Applications&sOrderBy=appName&bAscending=true)

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voltagex_
So how do you actually get a bug fixed in Wine? There's a whole lot of
blockers for anything based on the Wix installer.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Pull the source and get to work? :)

------
smortaz
Question for Wine aficionados: has anyone tried using Visual Studio on Wine?
Thanks.

~~~
voltagex_
You _may_ be able to get VS2010 hobbling along, but VS2012 is stopped by this
bug:
[http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17273](http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17273)

~~~
smortaz
dang :(. thanks a bunch for checking.

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rossy
It's great to see so many improvements in the DIB engine. I had to run
Electronics Workbench through Wine a couple of years ago, and while it was
definitely usable, it occasionally got messy corrupted graphics.

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sergimansilla
It would be nice if they moved development to Github. Easier to take a first
glance and contribute to the code.

