WINE question

So I was thinking about replacing Windows with Linux such as Ubuntu or Fedora and use WINE for my games that are mostly Win32 based.

Is it worth making the migration to Linux with WINE to run my games or do you think it will be more of a problem trying to get the Win32 games to run under Linux? I have heard of WINE being used to run Win32 applications, but I have never used it before to know just how good it is at running cross platform software and more specifically games.

I have heard of people playing World of Warcraft the game I play the most thru Linux and using Ubuntu and they claim to have used WINE, but this was just a conversation in chat channel. My system requirements shouldnt be a problem for drivers since I am using GeForce video etc.

For the most part, getting Windows games working on Linux through WINE is like trying to put a diaper on an incontinent buffalo. Most of the time it's just not possible and if you do succeed you will almost always be left with a gigantic mess.

LOL on the buffalo analogy. Thanks for your input on this subject. Guess I will stick with Windows since I already am running Windows, but it would be neat to sever my dependency on Micro$oft and go FREE with Linux someday. Maybe some day some group will make a SuperWINE that is less like trying to put a diaper on a buffalo for games etc sort of like a DOSBOX for Linux, but for Win32 games vs DOS. Or even better... the game manufacturers start to make games that are LINUX READY for the larger more popular distros!!!

I can see a SuperWINE type project coming to be, but cant see game manufacturers putting in the extra effort to make their games run on Linux, in addition to the additional tech support issues this would cause them in lesser profit margins.

You could buy an old PC used and put Linux on it.
 Have two monitors on your desk and two keyboards. No emulation needed. You can run Windows and Linux at the same time.
Linux the left hand-eye, windows on the right.
Or vice-versa. 

but it would be neat to sever my dependency on Micro$oft and go FREE with Linux someday.

Why do people get it in their head that Linux is the only free alternative? What about ReactOS, or FreeBSD, or OpenBSD? and honestly, the people who use those operating systems aren't hyperactive zealots which ought to make them a lot more attractive.

Maybe some day some group will make a SuperWINE that is less like trying to put a diaper on a buffalo for games etc sort of like a DOSBOX for Linux, but for Win32 games vs DOS. Or even better... the game manufacturers start to make games that are LINUX READY for the larger more popular distros!!!

There are two good reasons that popular  (I mean, things like, say, Just Cause 2, or Crysis, etc) aren't released for Linux. First, there is of course market share. A lot more people run windows, and making a Linux variant of the game makes the test matrix nearly infinite, as they now have to make sure the proper libs are installed, and they have to choose those libraries, and they have to make sure that if they need a newer version of the library some other application isn't using the currently installed older version, and if so they have no choice since Linux doesn't afaik have any support for Side by side library installations. Add to all that the fact that various distributions have different default libraries and different versions of those libraries released via their update mechanisms which could very well break any lib dependencies of something like a game, the fact that 3-D acceleration is about on par with windows 95/98, in that you have to fight with drivers and applications to  get anything but software rendering (not helped by the fact that Driver manufacturers realize there is no point in fully supporting 3-D since that isn't typically what a Linux user wants to do anyway).

Linux is an awesome server OS that has a excellent CLI, but it's desktop environments leave a lot to be desired. For one thing, none of them an agree on it; Unity? Gnome? KDE? LXDE? Some might argue that it's about "choice" but it's more about Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

Linux is not a replacement for windows, and will never be. There will not be a "year of the linux desktop" in the foreseeable future. They are different Operating Systems designed by different groups of people originally to perform completely different tasks and with different design goals. Linux would be a far better contender on the desktop if it wasn't for it's community constantly resorting to blame-shifting to account for bugs or omissions, and they of course fall back on the "It's free so you can't complain" argument sometimes, or  "it's open source so you can fix it yourself". Yes, I could, but I need to software to do a job, I'm not using it because I'm bored and need a task to do.

In any case, when it comes to games, either settle for the games already available for Linux (and despite what you note, plenty of spectacular games have been developed for it, just so long as you aren't after ridiculously over-the-top graphics). Plenty of indie titles run on it just fine, although I have found that a lot of them require you to do some funky things due to conflicting lib versions. it's either that, or accept that Linux is not a Operating System that is conducive to playing games. It's an awesome Server OS, though (which always makes me wonder why there are  "Server" variants of the popular distros). My laptop is currently running a LAMP server and serves a subdomain of my website, and I can hardly tell, aside from it being generally warmer than usual.

I can see a SuperWINE type project coming to be,

No. WINE is designed to allow programs written against the windows API to run on Linux. And for that purpose, it works perfectly fine. It has a few bugs but most of those are either corner cases or programs trying to call a Windows API function incorrectly and WINE reacting differently than the Windows API function. It is not designed to allow things like DirectX to be used on Linux. That was not it's goal. It is not a "Windows Emulator" (like say WoW (Windows on Windows) on windows itself), that is right in it's name, in face (WINE Is Not an Emulator). It is a "compatibility" library, which provides Windows API services to applications that expect it, as well as providing the functionality to start those programs. There will not be a "superWINE" the concept is in fact ludicrous. WINE itself is a spectacular and constantly evolving compatibility shim that does what it was designed to do 99.9% of the time. To suggest that a new project will not only do what WINE does but also allow for the use of DirectX and native windows OpenGL support, Windows Audio, WASAPI, and who knows what else merely to allow people to play games for windows on Linux is just plain silly. Linux is not for running Windows Games and never should be. if you want to run windows games, you run windows or wait for a port.

Warranted, this is coming from somebody whose favourite games all run on both platforms (Minecraft, Emulation). The difficulty of course comes with the fact that newer games use the hardware to it's limit, and because each Operating System deals with hardware differently so to would the games, which would overcomplicated things.

As a side note, calling Microsoft "Micro$oft" is not cool unless you are an overweight grubby 17 year old Linux zealot whose hands have a constant coating of cheetos. Either that, or you frequent slashdot or are one of Stallmans concubines. Generally I would assume any persons approach to an issue would be to find the method that provides the most flexibility and does it in the easiest fashion, particularly since for a lot of scenarios, while the Microsoft solution might cost money (let's compare say IIS to apache), it might also save money; if you already know C# but know nothing of PHP, for example, ASP.NET is going to be a lot easier to learn and work with then diving into Apache and learning PHP from scratch. Of course it won't hurt to learn PHP, but if you need that web server up "yesterday" you don't exactly have time to be poring over man pages and PHP/MySQL documentation. naturally the converse proves true, it will be faster and more cost-effective to use a LAMP server if you know PHP and nothing of C# or other .NET languages (which isn't atypical, given that Mono is regarded as "evil" purely based on it's choice of license).

What needs to happen with Linux, is they need to stop infighting about pedantic crap and arguing about philosophy and "get 'er done". You cannot sell even free software purely on philosophical merit, at least not to everybody. Essentially that is what seems to have happened with FreeBSD. How often do you hear somebody extoll the virtues of FreeBSD? Not often. But they exist. Linux zealots are the loudest to the point that it seems people feel it is the only existing free alternative, when it is neither the only one nor likely to be the best, and even if it was, one cannot know that without exploring the other options.

In a way this sort of illustrates the problem with zealotry on either side (windows, or Linux, or any of the other systems (OSX, FreeBSD). The reason is that in order to properly argue against, say, Windows users, you need to learn enough about windows to create that argument. And by the time you do, it's too late, you are now a windows user. Same with Linux. I see a lot of ignorant arguments against Linux as much as there are about Windows, In order to properly argue against  "linux users" you would need to learn about Linux, and again, by the time you do it's too late and you've become one yourself. Warranted, you can of course subjectively compare Operating Systems, but if you go in with the goal of "finding faults" with the system, you are doing yourself a disservice.


EDIT: wow, 15,000 posts? 

BC, That's good stuff.
If you could just make it into smaller chunks.
Think of breakfast cereal. Make it bite size.

And Windows is not everything.
List of operating systems

Many OS in current use do not have much of a GUI. But they do usefull work in Banks, Dispatch, Government, Hospitals, Laudromats, ans so on.

And Windows is not everything.

It is when you are talking about modern games. it's either windows, or a console.

It is when you are talking about modern games. it's either windows, or a console.

Right. The game makes have a clear objective. Making money. Only a few games survive as free software.
The cost to the PC manufacture is maybe between $40 to $80 for the Microsoft Windows 7 OS. If the manufacture could do it better, they would. If selling WINE to kids was legal, they would brew it.

There is not good reason to make a 'Super Wine' emulator. Anybody can now buy a factory refurbished PC with Windows 7 64 bit and 2 GB of memory for about $250. That is a one-time investment. The games and hardware upgrades son eclipse the cost of the Microsoft OS. Expect Windows 7 to be around for seven years more or less. The games will get boring before that.

I agree with you BC. If I could find a flaw in you dissertation, I would say so. For gaming, you have to go windows. I ran into the argument years ago when I was tying to get people to go with Linux. The gamers knew better even back then.

 

Why do people get it in their head that Linux is the only free alternative? What about ReactOS

You cannot be serious. 

You cannot be serious. 

ReactOS isn't an alternative? It isn't free? Pretty sure it is both of those.

Incorrect on point one - it is not a viable alternative at this stage.  It's barely alpha.

Incorrect on point one - it is not a viable alternative at this stage.  It's barely alpha.

viable:Capable of working successfully

software being in alpha or early development has no direct bearing on it's viability. viability would depend on the task for which it needs to work successfully. ReactOS works fine for web browsing, word processing, E-mail, youtube videos/flash, winamp, even photoshop (although not CS5), which cover a wide assortment of tasks and for many people would be just fine. Of course, if they have a computer they already have an Operating System that can perform those tasks and there is very little reason outside philosophical waxings to switch to another. surprisingly Wireless in general seems to work ok as long as you have a Windows Driver for it, which was a surprise for me since no distro I tried a mere 2 years ago on my laptop was able to use it's Wireless adapter. Of course it doesn't come with a Internet Browser, but that should hardly impact it's viability (since you can install Firefox just fine).

ReactOS is an open source computer operating system intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows NT versions 5.x and up (Windows 2000 and its successors). A spin-off of a previous attempt to clone Windows 95, development started in early 1998, and has continued with the incremental addition of features already found in Windows.
...
A claim was made on January 17, 2006 by now former developer Hartmut Birr on the ReactOS Developers mailing list (ros-dev) that ReactOS contained code derived from disassembling Microsoft Windows.
...
the software development tools was restored shortly afterward. In September 2007,
... Much of the assembly code that was allegedly copied have also been replaced

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

viable:Capable of working successfully

Look before you go all pedantic on me, consider the difference between "viable" and "viable alternative". 

ReactOS by its own admission has such a long list of deficiencies that it is not a viable alternative to Windows for the majority of real-world cases.  That's not to say it isn't viable (meaning that it's got a future) and that's not to deny the great work the ReactOS team has been doing.  I've been watching and appreciating their slow progress for many years.

But any person expecting to be able to switch to ReactOS as an alternative to Linux or Windows is going to be quite disappointed.  Alpha software is very very rarely going to be a reasonable alternative to production software.

Once ReactOS has got to the stage that Linux was say, 10 years ago, I for one will be cheering from the wings.

ReactOS Compatibility:
SimCity 3000 Unlimited 1.0
Microsoft Security Essentials 32-bit for XP
Media Player Classic (several versions)
Explorer++ 1.3.2
Opera (several versions)
OpenOffice.org (several versions)
SoftMaker Office 2006
WordPerfect Office (several versions)
WorksSuite ( Microsoft)

The above list is more that enough for many educational, light industry and home use. Anybody on a limit budget and many users would would choose or prefer  prefer using older software on a free OS.

The cost and learning curve issues can make a big difference in some applications. No one is saying the it has to be mainstream desktop.

Has the OP used both  WINE and ReactOS recently with older, cheaper Windows applications?

Thanks for info... Guess I will stick with Microsoft for games. Personally I have been using Microsoft for almost 30 years since DOS 2.11 way way back, prior to that was Tandy's Disk Operating System on a Trash 80 with cassette loads...lol  I have no problems with Microsoft, and have paid many thousands of dollars to them for licensing and OS over the years. The $ in place of the S was just to be funny, not to state that MS is evil..lol   Just that it costs money, and I like Free better, ONLY AS LONG AS FREE IS LEGAL. I dont bother with crackedware etc. Not worth the risk of getting busted. Guess I wont be severing my dependency on Microsoft in the near future for OS's since I am a gamer and so I have to stick with what the gaming industry uses as their supported platforms.

 Back in college I was surrounded by a large group who were all Linux is the ultimate OS and nothing is better. They urged me to go to a Linux show in Boston where you can bring a computer with you and they would put the next best distro on it for you to walk out with the ultimate OS in their eyes. I decided not to go because I didnt have a spare computer that was capable of the newest distro and had college projects that needed to be attended to on a full course load, plus working 2 jobs living on my own in my own home. So I didnt have the flexability and money they had to burn.

 For the fact that I stayed the course of Windows 98SE into Windows XP Pro while they stayed the course of Linux and shunned my not switching to the ultimate OS in their eyes, I thought maybe I was being biased in not switching. Now I realize that Linux is great in what it is capable of, but still has lots of limitations in the gaming aspects, and that it really comes down to personal preference for OS as well as sticking with the OS that the creator if the game created it for than trying to run it emulated etc unless I want to run into troubles.

Today I use Linux for web surfing, e-mail, and as a tool to fix troubled Windows systems hard drives. I guess I will stick with Linux as a workstation and tool vs the #1 solution to all aspects of my computing needs, which I had originally assumed it could easily be using WINE.

Back in college I was surrounded by a large group who were all Linux is the ultimate OS and nothing is better.

These are your typical Linux zealot. They ignore any and all faults with Linux and it's selections of software, pump up any minor advantage (usually comparing modern distros to falsehoods about how windows works) and dismiss any and all advantages of windows by virtue of Stallman not giving it his holy FSF blessing.

As I've said before, and I will again- any person who get's to the point of thinking any OS is better than any other has already lost. They only make that conclusion based on biased information about their "favourite", and are often blind to it's shortcomings, while also presenting ad hoc falsifications about other systems.

Operating Systems are software. The fact that people can feel so strongly that they become zealots about a bloody operating system or some specious and vaguely defined notion of "freedom" expressed as if it is some sort of holy crusade Is just bloody ridiculous. FreeBSD is a good OS because it is designed with Security in Mind. Windows is a good OS because it's flexible and works on a lot of hardware. The primary thing Linux has going for it on the desktop to most people is pretty much that it "isn't Windows" which as far as I'm concerned isn't exactly enough to qualify it as the "ultimate" Operating System.

I know no one's posted in here in awhile but I found it necessary to defend my OS 

Yes, Linux has its downfalls. Most typical programs won't run on it. (By the way, World of Warcraft got a Platinum rating running through Wine so it is safe to say that you would most likely that you should have no problems at all with it. In fact, WoW rates as one of the best Wine running games of all time. No joke.) but having few programs able to run means you never have to worry about getting virused or having malware or any of that stuff. Linux is both a blessing and a curse and while in the beginning, I hated Linux with all my heart since I didn't know how to use it, ever since I started getting used to it, I love it more and more. It is very fast. My Linux system (which is about 10 years old) boots up in 21 seconds from the time that I hit the power button till the time it showed the login screen. Also, once you get familiar with Linux and your computer running it, you will crash it once in a lifetime. I would suggest it if you are willing to work for something cool.

Myself, I spent a lot of time and effort promoting Linux a few years ago. I not longer use it on a regular basis. When I have a particular thing I want to do, I will bring up Linux for something that matters to me.


For a number of areas, Linux has already established itself. Any more competition with Windows will not make it any better.  Running Windows applications under Linux may violate copyright laws. The Linux community has no good reason to get into that kind of stuff. As mentioned, ReactOS has been tested and is useful with some important Windows applications.

The is no future in WINE.

More relevant issue is can Windows 8 compere with Linux in embedded systems, like tablet firmware.  (Example: Android)

I doubt it, Linux gets a lot smaller than windows does.

I doubt it, Linux gets a lot smaller than windows does.

What does that mean?
For embedded systems, Linux has a good position.
For the desktop it is limited.

The is no future in WINE.

There are a lot of people who would disagree with that statement!

The kink given above is fro the Wine Wiki.
Here is the reply for the other side of the aisle.
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=79785
So I will put a short thing on my Blog  about how one might go Linux or Windows but don't try to fuse them together. Really pointless. Like putting a Honda engine bin a Ford.

Déjà vu.

ReactOS is alpha.  WINE is far more mature.  A lot of people (like me) hope that ReactOS will one day be ready for prime time, but it's not there yet.  Compare attempting to install Office 2010 under ReactOS (you can't - it's not even on the roadmap) with installing it under WINE (you can).  This is just one of many many real-world reasons why WINE will remain considerably more relevant than ReactOS for some time to come.  Note that ReactOS has nothing that's equivalent to CrossOver.

I for one will continue cheering on ReactOS, because I am 100% behind what they have set out to achieve.

Really pointless. Like putting a Honda engine bin a Ford.

There may be some reasons why people might want to do such a thing.  But I think a better analogy would be putting a Honda engine into a Caterham or other owner-built car and there are many reasons why an owner would make such a choice.