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I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having

I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now does cloudy things. Since I just want to run the thing off-line without any external interference I prefer the 2016 version over newer incarnations. On Windows I'd have to try to eradicate every last trace of Sketchup from the registry and any other location used to determine whether this is the first time the program has been installed. On Linux the solution is simple, just wipe $WINEPREFIX and re-install (an automated process) to the same location. A simple script does the job, sketchup -r and I'm set. By the way, $WINEPREFIX can also be used to make sure you don't wreck your entire Wine setup with a single typo. Just make sure all your serious use of Wine is done with a specific, non-default prefix and you're set.

mkup 7y ago
"now does cloudy things" has really made my day, thanks. Unfortunately, a lot of modern software does cloudy things, Windows 10 and MS Office included.
- diegoperini 7y ago
  I love IntelliJ approach to these cloudy things. They know developers are smart enough to remove whatever smart thing they can come up with, so instead, they do the obvious and kindly step back. I apologize for removing their registry entry on Windows for Rider and I promise I will pay for the product when I am financially confident enough to do so. :)
jeroenhd 7y ago
There's applications to do this on Windows too. Using Sandboxie you can create a sandbox on the file system to isolate files (for sketchup for example) in the same way you can use a Wine prefix to isolate a single application. Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.
- technofiend 7y ago
  It bears mention that sandboxie is now free and transitioning to open source. So hopefully the original poster doesn't also have to uninstall and reinstall it due to cloudy things.

mkup 7y ago

"now does cloudy things" has really made my day, thanks. Unfortunately, a lot of modern software does cloudy things, Windows 10 and MS Office included.

diegoperini 7y ago
I love IntelliJ approach to these cloudy things. They know developers are smart enough to remove whatever smart thing they can come up with, so instead, they do the obvious and kindly step back. I apologize for removing their registry entry on Windows for Rider and I promise I will pay for the product when I am financially confident enough to do so. :)

jeroenhd 7y ago

There's applications to do this on Windows too. Using Sandboxie you can create a sandbox on the file system to isolate files (for sketchup for example) in the same way you can use a Wine prefix to isolate a single application. Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.

technofiend 7y ago
It bears mention that sandboxie is now free and transitioning to open source. So hopefully the original poster doesn't also have to uninstall and reinstall it due to cloudy things.