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Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much,

by joleyj 8mo ago

Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward. But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current. Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.

qdotme 8mo ago
Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs. I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
- joleyj 8mo ago
  I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality. It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
  - lonjil 8mo ago
    > I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality. It didn't.
  - qdotme 8mo ago
    Or „just enough” for the subset of users that is „enough” to ensure product viability. The absolutism of „all or nothing” is rooted in the strictly-better mentality for replacing something. For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible. For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
- freeAgent 8mo ago
  They never got Office or any Adobe (or similar) apps working, which is a huge miss.
  - pyreko 8mo ago
    There was a PR for Adobe products a few weeks ago (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310), though it seems like they're redirecting it to the main Wine repo now since it makes more sense there
hu3 8mo ago
In my experience half the things I ran in Wine ran better in it than Windows. So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.

by joleyj 8mo ago

qdotme 8mo ago

Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs. I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.

joleyj 8mo ago
I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality. It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
- lonjil 8mo ago
  > I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality. It didn't.
- qdotme 8mo ago
  Or „just enough” for the subset of users that is „enough” to ensure product viability. The absolutism of „all or nothing” is rooted in the strictly-better mentality for replacing something. For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible. For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
freeAgent 8mo ago
They never got Office or any Adobe (or similar) apps working, which is a huge miss.
- pyreko 8mo ago
  There was a PR for Adobe products a few weeks ago (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310), though it seems like they're redirecting it to the main Wine repo now since it makes more sense there

hu3 8mo ago

In my experience half the things I ran in Wine ran better in it than Windows. So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.