wine users - Nov 2008 - Re: The single major remaining Wine complaint everyone makes...

my thought is that the people that are complaining that the buttons and look of
programs running in wine are the same ones that allow Microsoft to keep working
on their GUI and not focusing on the kernel of their operating systems (anyone
remember the talking paperclip in MSoffice?) They're worried about how
pretty everythign is and not how it performs. hence the reason that Vista and xp
never got rid of the infamous "blue-screen" error. hell when vista
calls the screen in their error-logging a blue screen error. the only reason
that wine currently exists is the lack of support from main stream distros
building an operating version of their programs for linux operatiing systems
(may be due to an abundance of distros) but if the people using linux started to
use the open source versions available to everyone i.e. openoffice vs msoffice,
kpdf vs adobe, etc... it would put a demand on the mainstream distros to start
to adapt to at least the bigger distros for linux and provide support for the
users running in a unix enviroment. Its all supply and demand, unfortunatly this
time in reverse, they have the supply and we don't demand much of a change,
we offer them our money instead of trying to force the change we want.

Ok Lets start at the top.

2d issue is part X11 one.   There is a hack around it in the registry for direct
draw applications.  http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw  Ie send 2d direct draw
threw opengl.

Fix for X11 hopefully should turn up next X11 release providing 2d acceleration
in X11.  Yes every standard desktop window under X.org at moment is 2d software
rendered.  Ever wondered why normal X11 windows are slow to render same problem.

Simple fact Linux kernel only really becomes a desktop kernel with 2.6.29 if
kernel mode switching goes in.  Freeipa project around the same time ie april
next year should be getting close to something equal to a ADS for controlling
Linux clients.

While X11 can lock up with no way to recover Linux is really not desktop ready.

Distrobutions are not the solutions to the Linux problems.  They are nothing
more than windows dressing.  Install openoffice on debian you don't get sun
open office instead you get novel version.   This only makes matter worse users
really don't know what they are getting.  Linux Standard Base when they get
around to the common installer format for all distrobutions maybe we can start
getting somewhere.

2009 should be a interesting year.

2008/11/25 Foulkr <wineforum-user at winehq.org>:
> my thought is that the people that are complaining that the buttons and
look of programs running in wine are the same ones that allow Microsoft to keep
working on their GUI and not focusing on the kernel of their operating systems
(anyone remember the talking paperclip in MSoffice?) They're worried about
how pretty everythign is and not how it performs. hence the reason that Vista
and xp never got rid of the infamous "blue-screen" error. hell when
vista calls the screen in their error-logging a blue screen error. the only
reason that wine currently exists is the lack of support from main stream
distros building an operating version of their programs for linux operatiing
systems (may be due to an abundance of distros) but if the people using linux
started to use the open source versions available to everyone i.e. openoffice vs
msoffice, kpdf vs adobe, etc... it would put a demand on the mainstream distros
to start to adapt to at least the bigger distros for linux and provide support
for the users running in a unix enviroment. Its all supply and demand,
unfortunatly this time in reverse, they have the supply and we don't demand
much of a change, we offer them our money instead of trying to force the change
we want.

For current software, the objection is that Wine doesn't let things
stay exactly the same but with Unix underneath. How reasonable an
objection this is depends on the app - for example, the open-source
equivalents of Photoshop or AutoCAD really aren't substitutes on the
high-end professional level as far as the people working on that level
are concerned.

Lack of good support for .NET 2.0 and apps compiled against recent
VC++ is a reasonable problem to raise when the apps themselves are
open source! (e.g. AutoWikiBrowser, an open-source Wikipedia fast
editor which happens to be written against .NET 2.0).

Wine's killer app in my experience is running old stuff. That one
little Windows app that was keeping you running one Windows box just
to use it - and you can't even *find* the developer any more, let
alone ask them to do a Linux version. Wine runs those better and
better. Often better than XP does, almost always better than Vista
does.

Microsoft would like to keep Windows a moving target, but they're
hampered by their own need for extensive backward compatibility (c.f.
difficulty running old stuff in Vista or XP). So Wine can do better
catching up incrementally than one might expect.

At this stage I'm still more surprised when stuff doesn't Just Work in
Wine than when it does. Which is nice.


- d.