Well said austin. I'm a newbie to this site, but I am no stranger to forums
(I'm a moderator on a Land Rover club forum), so I'm 'in tune'
with the way forum users usually think. It means I can usually spot posts from
users who are looking at things from a different direction (and often one that
doesn't match the forum ethos) and so I am able to treat those post
accordingly, sifting out the good info from the rest of the post. Complete
newbies to forums don't have that skill and often take every word written in
a post as aboslute unquesionable truth, and that can lead to confusion and
misinformation, even though everyone who has contributed to a thread may have
done so with the most honourable of intentions.
I am interested in Wine for a number of reasons. I run a lot of legacy software
(mostly Windows based) both at home and at work. I am now looking into ways of
maintaining the ability to run that legacy software without the need to keep old
hardware running, which is getting ever more difficult. So far I have been
looking into Wine and virtual machines as options. At the moment thigns are not
too difficult at home as I have a PC that I can boot into any one of five
different versions of Windows if I need to, but it is now getting on a bit and
is not up to running some of the more recent stuff I'd like to use, so I
need to upgrade the machine. However, if I do I'll lose my current graphics
card which has drivers for all versions of Windows from 3.11 onwards and end up
with something that has just XP & Vista support. If I get to that level, I
need another mean of running the older software I use as I find XP's
compatibility modes a waste of space (most of the old software I use won't
run regardless of the compatibility settings). The options I have are to run
real copies of the old Windows OS's under virtual machines, or to run the
applications directly under Wine which, I believe, makes a better job of
'being compatible' to older versions of software than XP or Vista. the
fact that some of the software I run might well have native Linux version is
irrelevant. I am very much a fan of MS Office 2000 & 2003. I can't stand
Office 2007 so I won't be upgrading, and I find openoffice.org a very poor
substitute which is probably closer to Office 95 in terms of usability and
features. So, if I go the Linux route, I'll be running Office 2000 or 2003
under Wine even though the distro I choose will probably include openoffice.org
as standard. If I go the Linux route with a new machine, it won't be because
I want to use Linux and Linux apps instead of Windows & Windows apps, it
will be because I want the ability to chose which bits of Linux and Windows I
want to use together.