5 ms·

Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine late

by biehl 12y ago

Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine lately?

kiallmacinnes 12y ago
I have, it wasn't pretty... For simple apps, It seems to do well.. For anything complex, it's painful.
orkoden 12y ago
RTFA > “We have a very limited Wine installation, because there’s always the need to save the configuration of Wine together with the application. They’re deeply dependent. If you change the version of Wine, you have to do something with the application, and vice-versa. We saw that we’d have to use 10 or 15 different configurations of Wine on the same machine in some cases
- stcredzero 12y ago
  There are tools that will package a Wine installation together with the app.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    This is nothing against Wine or Linux, but shows why organizations will choose Windows after a business analysis - fixed costs. Wine like other Free or Open Source Software sends people down the rabbit hole because there is no single source of responsibility other than the individual user or organization themselves. You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem and the business case for Wine developers to fix edge cases is comparatively weak compared to the business case at Microsoft. To put it another way, there's a solution for experienced Wine users, but the government of Munich's business is not developing software expertise in regard to Wine. Solving problems with Wine doesn't scale to other parts of Linux. That same troubleshooting process has to be repeated again and again for other software with varying support documentation quality and community sympathy.
    - riquito 12y ago
      > You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem Actually you can: first item in the help page http://www.winehq.org/help/ http://www.winehq.org/help/ Of course if you meant "support on the phone for free" that's not gonna happen.
      - brudgers 12y ago
        One option is reading the FAQ...114 line items all on a single page, and then going to the User Guide, and then the man pages and some online community forums, etc. and developing your own expertise. Maybe, after something between a few minutes and several months, a user will discover some of these tools to which the above post referred. But only maybe. The other option is hiring a consultant. A copy of Windows is $200. The reason for using Wine is running Windows programs. The business case for Wine becomes weak for many people pretty quick when time is money, e.g. how long does it take before the cost in cash and time associated with consultants costs more than Windows? The quality of support for non-technical Linux users is why a company can make a business out of supporting Wine. Indeed, it's why RedHat can be a public company.
        phaemon 12y ago
        Stop trying to suggest that Windows applications - indeed, Windows itself - always work perfectly and never need support. The idea is laughable. Companies make a lot of money as Microsoft Consultants you know.
        brudgers 12y ago
        I used Windows for the first time in 1988, briefly. From 1992 I've had an installation continuously. However, over the past three years or so, I've been increasingly using Linux and since the first of the year, but for TurboTax season and a few brief sessions, I have entirely transitioned. The quality of Windows self-support is vastly superior to that of Linux. The quality of free support for Windows programs is vastly superior to that of FOSS when the problem is immediate and my level of expertise with the software is not high. Yes, the answers to all questions about Emacs are in the manual, but it's six hundred fucking pages plus another twelve hundred on Lisp. Which isn't so much the problem as that googling for answers tends to return, RTFM. That's the same for Wine. If you have 114 frequently asked questions, it suggests that maybe the product could be improved. Or at least the documentation. I'm not picking on Wine. But using Wine for most people is an ideological statement. It's going to church and professing their faith. It's jumping through hoops if what matters is running Windows applications - you can buy a used computer running Windows for $150 plus shipping allday anyday everyday. The only viable FOSS business model is providing support. RedHat's yearly per user charge is almost the retail cost of Windows. And that's as mainstream as FOSS gets. Consultants for both Windows and FOSS make their money B2B. Wine is marketed to end users as a solution to ordinary problems. But there's no infrastructure to support such users. That's the problem MicroSoft solved. They focus on B2B level support and provide it in the consumer sector. It's what allowed them to scale. Don't misunderstand me. I deeply respect Stallman's philosophy and admire his accomplishments. But that doesn't require me to hate Gates or MicroSoft. He and the company he founded did more to put a computer on every desk and in every home than anyone else. I wouldn't be running Linux or using Emacs but for the commercial success of Windows.
adwn 12y ago
I have. I'm using it for a German tax reporting software (ElsterFormular), and I couldn't get it to run at all with the current Wine version (1.7.17), so I had to downgrade Wine to 1.6.1 so it would work (but not without prepending "taskset -c 0"). So yeah, when Wine works flawlessly, it's great. When it doesn't: good luck.
- pritambaral 12y ago
  1.7 is not stable, I think. The last time I had issues with wine, I learned that 1.odd is unstable and 1.even is stable.
  - adwn 12y ago
    Ah, thanks, that's good to know. Still, the 1.6.1 version crashes if started without "taskset -c 0", so either it's a concurrency bug in Wine, or Wine exposes a concurrency bug in the software. In any case, this is one more data point showing that using Wine in a production environment is not necessarily a good idea.

by biehl 12y ago

Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine lately?

kiallmacinnes 12y ago

I have, it wasn't pretty... For simple apps, It seems to do well.. For anything complex, it's painful.

orkoden 12y ago

RTFA > “We have a very limited Wine installation, because there’s always the need to save the configuration of Wine together with the application. They’re deeply dependent. If you change the version of Wine, you have to do something with the application, and vice-versa. We saw that we’d have to use 10 or 15 different configurations of Wine on the same machine in some cases

stcredzero 12y ago
There are tools that will package a Wine installation together with the app.
- brudgers 12y ago
  This is nothing against Wine or Linux, but shows why organizations will choose Windows after a business analysis - fixed costs. Wine like other Free or Open Source Software sends people down the rabbit hole because there is no single source of responsibility other than the individual user or organization themselves. You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem and the business case for Wine developers to fix edge cases is comparatively weak compared to the business case at Microsoft. To put it another way, there's a solution for experienced Wine users, but the government of Munich's business is not developing software expertise in regard to Wine. Solving problems with Wine doesn't scale to other parts of Linux. That same troubleshooting process has to be repeated again and again for other software with varying support documentation quality and community sympathy.
  - riquito 12y ago
    > You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem Actually you can: first item in the help page http://www.winehq.org/help/ http://www.winehq.org/help/ Of course if you meant "support on the phone for free" that's not gonna happen.
    - brudgers 12y ago
      One option is reading the FAQ...114 line items all on a single page, and then going to the User Guide, and then the man pages and some online community forums, etc. and developing your own expertise. Maybe, after something between a few minutes and several months, a user will discover some of these tools to which the above post referred. But only maybe. The other option is hiring a consultant. A copy of Windows is $200. The reason for using Wine is running Windows programs. The business case for Wine becomes weak for many people pretty quick when time is money, e.g. how long does it take before the cost in cash and time associated with consultants costs more than Windows? The quality of support for non-technical Linux users is why a company can make a business out of supporting Wine. Indeed, it's why RedHat can be a public company.
      - phaemon 12y ago
        Stop trying to suggest that Windows applications - indeed, Windows itself - always work perfectly and never need support. The idea is laughable. Companies make a lot of money as Microsoft Consultants you know.
        brudgers 12y ago
        I used Windows for the first time in 1988, briefly. From 1992 I've had an installation continuously. However, over the past three years or so, I've been increasingly using Linux and since the first of the year, but for TurboTax season and a few brief sessions, I have entirely transitioned. The quality of Windows self-support is vastly superior to that of Linux. The quality of free support for Windows programs is vastly superior to that of FOSS when the problem is immediate and my level of expertise with the software is not high. Yes, the answers to all questions about Emacs are in the manual, but it's six hundred fucking pages plus another twelve hundred on Lisp. Which isn't so much the problem as that googling for answers tends to return, RTFM. That's the same for Wine. If you have 114 frequently asked questions, it suggests that maybe the product could be improved. Or at least the documentation. I'm not picking on Wine. But using Wine for most people is an ideological statement. It's going to church and professing their faith. It's jumping through hoops if what matters is running Windows applications - you can buy a used computer running Windows for $150 plus shipping allday anyday everyday. The only viable FOSS business model is providing support. RedHat's yearly per user charge is almost the retail cost of Windows. And that's as mainstream as FOSS gets. Consultants for both Windows and FOSS make their money B2B. Wine is marketed to end users as a solution to ordinary problems. But there's no infrastructure to support such users. That's the problem MicroSoft solved. They focus on B2B level support and provide it in the consumer sector. It's what allowed them to scale. Don't misunderstand me. I deeply respect Stallman's philosophy and admire his accomplishments. But that doesn't require me to hate Gates or MicroSoft. He and the company he founded did more to put a computer on every desk and in every home than anyone else. I wouldn't be running Linux or using Emacs but for the commercial success of Windows.

adwn 12y ago

I have. I'm using it for a German tax reporting software (ElsterFormular), and I couldn't get it to run at all with the current Wine version (1.7.17), so I had to downgrade Wine to 1.6.1 so it would work (but not without prepending "taskset -c 0"). So yeah, when Wine works flawlessly, it's great. When it doesn't: good luck.

pritambaral 12y ago
1.7 is not stable, I think. The last time I had issues with wine, I learned that 1.odd is unstable and 1.even is stable.
- adwn 12y ago
  Ah, thanks, that's good to know. Still, the 1.6.1 version crashes if started without "taskset -c 0", so either it's a concurrency bug in Wine, or Wine exposes a concurrency bug in the software. In any case, this is one more data point showing that using Wine in a production environment is not necessarily a good idea.