6 ms·

Honest 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

Honest 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Check 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 ago
I play plenty of games that way, but with Steam/Linux Support and less free time I am starting to care less.
matteotom 13y ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
I use it to run foobar2000 on Linux.
- teh_klev 13y ago
  Ooh, good use case :)
Moto7451 13y ago
I use it to test various versions of IE on my Mac without having Windows installed.
ama729 13y ago
Audio applications works pretty well with wine.
rprospero 13y ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
My 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
My 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 ago
I 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 ago
I don't know... In 2001 I used to play war craft 3 with wine and it worked great
jevinskie 13y ago
I 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 ago
People 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 ago
As 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 ago
An 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 ago
  Thanks so much for LMMS :) one of the only free replacements for FL Studio, and runs on everything to boot!
- davidgerard 13y ago
  Annoyingly, 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 ago
  Aren'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 ago
    I'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 ago
    There'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 ago
photoshop (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 ago
I 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 ago
On 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 ago
A 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 ago
Two 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 ago
I 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 ago
Its canonical use is That Just One Windows App. Usually something obscure and old.

frenchman_in_ny 13y ago

I 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 ago
Check 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 ago

I play plenty of games that way, but with Steam/Linux Support and less free time I am starting to care less.

matteotom 13y ago

I 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 ago

I 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 ago

I use it to run foobar2000 on Linux.

teh_klev 13y ago
Ooh, good use case :)

Moto7451 13y ago

I use it to test various versions of IE on my Mac without having Windows installed.

ama729 13y ago

Audio applications works pretty well with wine.

rprospero 13y ago

I 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 ago

I 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 ago

My 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 ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago

Yes, 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago

My 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 ago

I 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 ago

I don't know... In 2001 I used to play war craft 3 with wine and it worked great

jevinskie 13y ago

I 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 ago

People 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 ago

As 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 ago

An 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 ago
Thanks so much for LMMS :) one of the only free replacements for FL Studio, and runs on everything to boot!
davidgerard 13y ago
Annoyingly, 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 ago
Aren'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 ago
  I'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 ago
  There'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 ago

photoshop (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 ago

I 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 ago

On 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 ago

A 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 ago

Two 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 ago

I 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 ago

Its canonical use is That Just One Windows App. Usually something obscure and old.