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Wine 1.7.12 Released
- cordite 13y agoPlenty of EVE online fixes. I wonder what their distribution of users is..
- dippyskoodlez 13y agoI think having developer "support" helps motivation and I wouldn't be surprised if some contribute.
- mildtrepidation 13y agoHonest question: What do people use Wine for? The only thing I ever tried under it was games, and for that it was... meh. I'm assuming my experience was sub-par because my expectations were unreasonable. But I'd really like to know whether people are actually effectively using things like Office with Wine or whether there's some Door Number Three that I'm just not seeing.
- frenchman_in_ny 13y agoI use it for geotagging applications (geosetter.de) on a Mac, but unfortunately part of it needs IE which isn't particularly well implemented. Also, certain Office apps work differently between Mac & Windows (in particular, Excel), and OpenOffice/LibreOffice aren't perfect replacements.
- moondowner 13y agoCheck out the latest version of LibreOffice (4.2), interoperability with OOXML is way improved, and as always, there are some fixes in Calc/Excel https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-2-new-features-and-fixes/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-2-new-features-and-fi... Maybe LibreOffice isn't perfect yet, but I believe it will get there.
- davidgerard 13y ago(standard message) If you find a reproducible import/export fidelity bug, ideally with a minimal test case, file a bug. They jump on those like attack dogs, and you can be reasonably sure it'll be fixed next version.
- nickstinemates 13y agoI play plenty of games that way, but with Steam/Linux Support and less free time I am starting to care less.
- matteotom 13y agoI only use it for SketchUp and Netflix now. I used it a lot when I first switched to Linux (iTunes, Office, Steam), but it's become less necessary as I've learned how to avoid Windows applications and more applications have ported to Linux.
- calt 13y agoI know that gog.com has been packaging up games for OSX with it. It works pretty well for that jump. One person configures it once and ships the app with its own wineskin and it just works.
- yoodenvranx 13y agoI use it to run foobar2000 on Linux.
- teh_klev 13y agoOoh, good use case :)
- Moto7451 13y agoI use it to test various versions of IE on my Mac without having Windows installed.
- ama729 13y agoAudio applications works pretty well with wine.
- rprospero 13y agoI used Wine quite a bit, but it's usually to get data out of obscure formats saved by obscure software. I've recently needed Wine for the following: 1) Read files saved by thermal imaging camera (no Linux or Mac software available) 2) Extract data from OriginPro worksheet (no viewer for Linux) 3) Run Bloch solver for neutron precession in magnetic fields
- buu700 13y agoI use it for Netflix, but that's about it. Still nice to know that it exists in the event that I ever need it in some specific obscure case.
- chx 13y agoMy bank has a small business ebank site which is IE only (and you need to put IE11 in compatibility mode). It might suck but my income is in USD and I live in Canada and via this web app I have access to the FX trading desk from my home. That access literally pays enough to put up with IE.
- vinceguidry 13y ago> My bank has a small business ebank site which is IE only (and you need to put IE11 in compatibility mode). Wow. That alone would get me to switch banks. Then again, the only thing I ever use the website for is to check my balance.
- gbl08ma 13y agoI use MS Office 2010 under Wine. There are tutorials on the Internet that make it really easy to set up. It needs a specific version of Wine to work (some 1.5.x release), so I'm using it on a PlayOnLinux virtual drive (that way I can easily have multiple Wine versions and configs on my system, tailored to each software). The hardest part was making the file associations work correctly (because that was not explained in the tutorial, but it was easy to figure out). Word, Excel and PowerPoint work fine. VBA does not work (not something I need). It suffers from some graphic bugs (mostly in the properties dialog, for objects in PowerPoint for example; usually you can fix it by reloading the dialog), also, TrueType doesn't look perfect. I can't remember having it crash heavily. I needed MS Office because while Open/LibreOffice is good enough for most things, and is actually more than sufficient if you write your materials from beginning to end in them and never export to proprietary formats (i.e., always keep saving in ODF), the compatibility layer with MS Office is not perfect and is not sufficient for more advanced things (such as the fancy 3D-and-the-like styling options my colleagues insist on using). The imperfections* of the document compatibility layer become a problem when working on the same document with people who use MS Office. Using a virtual machine would probably work, too... if I had an infinite amount of Windows licenses. I can't use the license from my real-hardware install, as I still need Windows-on-real-hardware for a few things (to do with drivers and device flashing). Using Office was the main reason why I had to reboot into Windows, and so I couldn't be happier with this setup. My productivity has increased a lot (no need to wait for reboots). Besides Office, I also use Wine to run the emulator of a platform for which I develop software (the emulator is not open source, and are not available for any Unix but OS X, which I don't have access too). So Wine does a really great job for me, doing things that I think can be called "effective usage" (in fact, I don't run any games under Wine). * MS Office import/export is actually quite good for a FOSS piece of software, and while the "imperfections" are being perfected as new versions are released, Microsoft too keeps releasing new Office versions with more shiny features, so I understand the difficulty on keeping up with the compatibility on closed formats.
- blueblob 13y agoThe state of libreoffice is quite good in general, but for academic papers with references it tends to butcher them. I haven't tried wine for MS office, I run in a VM instead because someone else told me that their version of office didn't run well in wine. I guess it's not a very good reason and I should give it a try.
- Aardwolf 13y agoYes, games. Works quite well for me. Not only for some old ones, also recent ones work very well. For some games, the trick is to use Wine's "desktop" windowed mode to make them work nicely. Some games have a Linux binary as well (and unfortunately no source code), and yet the Wine one will work better. The Linux binary will be like "old-version-of-some-library.so not found" or "could not connect to X server", while Wine acts as a rock-solid stable graphics and gaming API! The only sad thing is that relevant versions of Internet Explorer don't work in it, that would be very handy for testing something in multiple browsers.
- davidgerard 13y agoYes, it's somewhat disconcerting that the years- and decades-stable binary API for Linux, that can be relied upon to work, will be ... Win32.
- chc 13y agoMy use case: I used Wine to let our advertising representatives use a PDF markup tool wit some specific capabilities they wanted that turned out to be Windows-only. It took less time to set up than it would have to even find a good alternative.
- stephen_g 13y agoI mainly use Mac OS and Linux, and the application the Tax Office in my country makes for you to file your tax return for many years only ran on Windows. Only last year they brought out a Mac version, but still you need Wine for Linux.
- taf2 13y agoI don't know... In 2001 I used to play war craft 3 with wine and it worked great
- jevinskie 13y agoI use it to run AnalogX's PCalc (programmer's calculator). I haven't found a match for it on Linux or Mac. Python/IPython REPL is better for the history, functions, and variables but I haven't figured out a good way to replicate C arithmetic rules when it comes to overflow/underflow/finite bit limits. It would be neat if I could somehow "type" variables/literals to C types in Python.
- roryokane 13y agoPeople in the console video game modding community sometimes release Windows-only small computer programs that help you with one step of modifying your console. If the program doesn’t require complicated interaction, it’s easier for me to open it in Wine than to exit OS X and boot into Windows just to use it. One Windows-only modding program is Lunar IPS (http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/240/ http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/240/), which patches ROM files using a custom patch format for GameBoy Advance games. Another program was Wii Code Manager (which now has a cross-platform replacement in Java), which let you select a subset of cheats from a database in a text file, then compiled those cheats into a GCT file so they could be applied to a game. I’ve also used Wine to try out very small games, such those created in game jams. I wouldn’t want to play a game permanently like that, because the game saves might be locked into the Wine version and Wine might turn out to be too slow, but Wine is fine for trying out the game to figure out if I want to play it, or playing a simple game that doesn’t save.
- GeneralMayhem 13y agoAs a student, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it for e-book readers. My university library has a bunch of books available on Adobe Digital Editions, and Amazon lets you rent Kindle books for a user-specified amount of time. Both Digital Editions and Kindle for PC work very well on WINE.
- AndyKelley 13y agoAn open source project I contribute to uses wine in a pretty cool way I think. Actually it's mentioned in these wine release notes - LMMS. It's a music production studio, and one of the features that it offers is to use a VST instrument. A VST instrument is a .dll file which provides a virtual instrument for the user to use in their music project. So here we have this native linux app but it is able to take advantage of .dll plugins using wine.
- girvo 13y agoThanks so much for LMMS :) one of the only free replacements for FL Studio, and runs on everything to boot!
- davidgerard 13y agoAnnoyingly, LMMS Windows doesn't run immaculately under Wine! http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35508 http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35508 Qt file picker, I think. (The sidebar stuff doesn't work either, I suspect for the same reason.) All the code is open source, just needs someone looking at what's happening.
- fuzzix 13y agoAren't there licensing issues around the VST SDK which means LMMS rarely ships with VST functionality built in? I tried building it with VST support once, not exactly seamless - not sure I ever got it to work.
- AndyKelley 13y agoI'm not aware of any licensing issues, but VST support is certainly turned on by default, at least at this point in time.
- wrl 13y agoThere's a clean-room reimplementation that LMMS ships with called VeSTige. Ardour3 also uses said code for VST hosting. The effort isn't complete (they didn't re-implement all the corners), but it works well enough.
- webreac 13y agophotoshop (I had never the time to learn gimp and I have only one life) powerpoint viewer Some small programs I have developped on windows years ago
- davidgerard 13y agoI used to work in television. Sky TV in the UK uses a platform called OpenTV, which like anything with "open" in the name is a proprietary vertical-market app that charges thousands of dollars per seat per year. One part of the content chain is a compiler that's supplied as a Windows binary. That bit ran immaculately under Wine 0.9.something on CentOS, saving us a few Windows licenses. tl;dr Wine is usable for production work, anyone who claims it isn't is simply incorrect.
- wsc981 13y agoOn Mac OS X I use it to play the original Baldur's Gate and might use it to play Baldur's Gate 2 as well. I think it's a great solution for playing old games or games that were never released for Mac OS in the first place. I used to play League of Legends using Wine until Riot released a native Mac OS X version. OS X Wine skins for many games can be found at sites like Paul The Tall: http://paulthetall.com http://paulthetall.com
- a8da6b0c91d 13y agoA big, complicated in-house windows executable was blowing up with some memory errors. I tried to run it under valgrind with wine and it just worked! I was able to use valgrind to debug the issues.
- ojii 13y agoTwo things. Games, which is hit and miss but I'm still deeply impressed by the wine devs. Civ V runs amazingly well and it seems smother than the native OS X version, though that impression might be influenced by the wine version on Linux supporting mods, unlike the OS X version. Secondly to compile Python projects to .exe files using Pyinstaller. Wouldn't use this for paid projects but for fun side-projects it's great.
- ZoFreX 13y agoI use Windows 7 in VirtualBox under OSX quite a lot. It's just more convenient than rebooting into Bootcamp for things that work that way. Of course, as a heavy Windows user, I want Aero. It just looks wrong to me without it. I also want my Windows to be as fast as it would be if booted natively, and I even occasionally play games inside VMs. To achieve this, VirtualBox translates the DirectX calls in the VM into OpenGL calls on the host. Rather than reinvent the wheel, VirtualBox uses libraries developed by/for WINE. I also use WINE to run the odd Windows application or game under OSX or Linux. You can look up compatibility ratings of games on the Wine website, and for many it works absolutely perfectly. (For those where it doesn't, I sigh and reboot into Windows)
- davidgerard 13y agoIts canonical use is That Just One Windows App. Usually something obscure and old.
- MPSimmons 13y agoI look at the list of bug fixes, and I can't help but think that this is a losing battle, and that there are much more worthy projects that the concerted efforts of these undeniably skilled developers could be building.
- yogo 13y agoI have to agree. I think it's a great, and much needed, project but I discovered that just beefing up my hardware a little and running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end. Many applications don't work out of the box, and require all sorts of twists and turns to get them working, if at all possible.
- venomsnake 13y agoUntil Virgil3D is mature enough this approach is no starter for games.
- a3_nm 13y ago> running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end "cheaper"? Wine is free software, whereas to run Windows you need a Windows license.
- Edmond 13y agoRoger that. I use Ubuntu for all my dev work and for media manipulation work...If only these efforts would be dispensed on making the utility software on Linux user friendly. Have yet to find a screencast maker that just works :) At this stage working on something like wine seems like a misguided effort. I use windows as my primary desktop OS and it works well. For non-windows users, a vm solution would be way better than a kluge like wine.
- boohoofoodoo 13y agoBlizzard games on Ubuntu desktop, they all work perfectly.
- daniel_iversen 13y agoI use Wine on and off, so much that I bought the CrossOver app that's built on Wine.. I use it on Mac to run windows-only programs for work like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio and a small desktop tool we wrote a Lon time ago. I think Wine is amazing but must admit that one day it's use will probably be obsolete (there are alternatives to the Microsoft programs that are more or less "good enough").
- broodbucket 13y agoI think that when Wine was originally started, the goal must have been for it to be obsolete one day. That day is still very far away, and regardless, Wine is a technical marvel.
- davidgerard 13y agoNo. Win32 programs will be around approximately forever. Win32 will be one of those "forever" technologies. Like COBOL and now Java.
- YokoZar 13y agoI've been the Ubuntu developer responsible for Wine's packages for almost a decade now. Over the years I've encountered a lot of skepticism about Wine, with some people even wondering if we'd be better off without it existing. I've never been convinced. I hear an incredible number of stories about people who wanted to use Ubuntu, but couldn't because of one Windows app. Increasingly, I hear the inverse -- people who are happily using Ubuntu now because Wine works well enough. Data is hard to come by, but my best estimates put Wine's install base at something on the order of 10-25% of Ubuntu users. That means millions of users of my packages. Most are running games. Some use it for some sort of critical business function like a legacy app. I've contracted with a good number of companies who use Wine for critical business purposes. Wine is quickly becoming the porting tool of choice for making Mac and Linux versions of Windows software -- often times the game will work without modification, and when it doesn't these days it is dramatically cheaper to improve Wine than to rewrite applications. I do understand some of the skepticism though. A single bug can render an application completely unusable, so from a user's perspective it's very hard to tell whether Wine is 99% done or 5% done. But in the future, you won't even know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be powering your steam games.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago>But in the future, you won't even know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be powering your steam games. Do you mean it'll be powering Windows-native Steam games, or that Wine is somehow related to the Linux version of Steam?
- dippyskoodlez 13y agoI think he's referring to developers making a quick port using Wine as a wrapper similar to Cider. Cider sucks, though.
- YokoZar 13y agoYes, this is what I meant. Cider does suck, because Cider is based on a proprietary fork of a 7 year old branch of the Wine code and couldn't keep pace with the open source version. There's a reason Transgaming abandoned Cedega as a consumer product, and it's been that free Wine has been vastly superior for a while. Codeweavers has already moved into the porting space using their expertise around free Wine, and perhaps not surprisingly Transgaming has begun to pivot into completely different areas.
- hammerandtongs 13y agoI'm really pleased to see the activity level in Wine. It's clearly a long struggle with a horrible beast but they are brave souls for doing it. I think this will all be increasingly significant with Steambox coming along so nicely. Wine, for example, can play Planetside2 which is probably the one game that would keep me from getting rid of Windows over the longer term.
- TheOsiris 13y agowow! I didn't know this thing is still around. At this point, doesn't it make sense to make OSXE? I know it's not as catchy as WinE, so how about OXE? Kidding aside, I think the world needs an iOSE on windows and linux
- wsc981 13y agoThere's a project in the works, but I don't know how active it is. It's called Darling (DARwin on LINux): http://www.darlinghq.org http://www.darlinghq.org
- rocky1138 13y agoI played Max Payne the whole way through a few years ago on Mandriva. Worked a treat. I ended up buying a Crossover license as well.
- pjscott 13y agoCongratulations! Wine's existence continues to be superior to its nonexistence. I can't say it's ever been convenient to use, but switching operating systems has always been at least slightly worse.
- ausjke 13y agoWith virtualbox and its alternatives it's really hard for me to find a reason to use Wine, and yes I do not play games under Linux. Anyone can list some main usages for Wine?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- memracom 13y agoOn OS/X I tried sudo port install wine and it works! Of course I already have Macports installed, but this could be interesting to runs Windows apps alongside Mac apps.