Wine Devs Have Mixed Feelings Over Direct3D In Gallium3D

[pingufunkybeat]

Yay, praising MS, dissing RMS, and making a racist comment, all in just two sentences.

Let's see if anyone jumps on this troll.

[Jimmy]

AS LONG AS WINE EXISTS, NOBODY'S GOING TO BOTHER.

The only reason Epic ever entertained the notion of UT3 on Linux was because it didn't work in Wine? They blew off Linux once they figured Wine will get it working someday?

Or it could have had nothing to do with Wine at all. Much like the rest of the gaming industry, they simply do not care about Linux. Wine's existence is just as irrelevant to them.

Here's one for you.... Prey worked in Wine just fine BEFORE they released a native Linux port. Wine sure was relevant there wasn't it?

Here's another. Broadcom recently released native drivers for Linux despite ndiswrapper being a workable solution. Not much different than Wine, really. Why did they bother? Why didn't they just tell their users to use the "emulator"?

Some software will never be ported to Linux, ever. Is Wine going to hurt Linux adoption in those many, many, cases?

Firefox hurts Linux adoption. By offering a Windows version, people don't see much value in Linux because the same software exists in both places. Clearly we should only support technologies that only work on Linux. (Care to guess how many other software projects are hurting Linux in the same way?)

Or it could be that Firefox helps Linux adoption by providing a familiar face for Windows users who try Linux. It could also be that software running on more than one platform isn't a bad thing.

Lets take it a bit further. Kopete and Pidgin hurt Linux adoption. They depend on reversed engineered protocols that are incomplete. They don't offer the complete experience that their Windows counterparts do.

Ready for another one? GIMP hurts Linux because it's not Photoshop. (Yes, even if you rearrange the menus a bit and rebrand it with the word "shop".)

Speaking of Photoshop, has Adobe ever said their reason for not porting Photoshop to Linux is "because of Wine"? I believe their response has been that their software is good enough that users will use it regardless of the platform it pins users to. From their perspective porting it would be pointless because it's not like they are loosing customers over it. Again it has nothing to do with Wine.

Also how can you claim that Wine never works while also claiming it's a good excuse not to port software? How is Wine a good excuse if it doesn't work? Pick one please. The two troll lines are incompatible. One says Wine doesn't work good enough and the other says it works so good that companies need not bother porting.

[pingufunkybeat]

Look, I like WINE (though I don't use it), and I respect the effort that goes in there, as it does help some people run software they absolutely need. It's good to have such an option around, as a last resort.

But calling for Linux to be a graveyard of poorly implemented MS technologies just so kids can play their gamez without having to reboot is shite, and people like that should please go and kill some other operating system instead.

As long as companies do not develop native applications, software on Linux will always be poor, will perform poorly, and will be unsupported and unimportant. No amount of faking Windows is going to change this.

WINE is a last resort, not the direction Linux should be heading in. Screw Windows, screw .Net, screw MS Office formats, screw Silverlight, screw Direct3d. As soon as you make any of this work (poorly), they will introduce a new technology which won't work, and everybody will switch to that. They've been doing this shit for 15 years, and you're still falling for it.

Open standards, and open source whenever possible.

[Svartalf]

People, trying to out-Windows Windows has never worked for any operating system in history. And it has managed to kill at least one major heavyweight: OS/2.

More importantly, it has been tried with Linux for more than a decade, and it has NEVER worked for Linux either. Despite Cedega and Codeweavers, and despite Lindows, and other major experiments, which are either dead, or serve niche markets.

Marketing yourself as a cheap, almost compatible substitute for the Real Thing (tm) is not going to get Linux taken seriously. Even if it could, it's never been achieved.

There is no magic wand, and we have to keep gaining ground the hard way -- through relevant apps (such as Firefox, Webkit, OOo, server stuff, cross-platform toolkits, etc), offering a better system, and fighting for open standards and formats. The solution is NOT introducing all the broken monopolist standards which CANNOT be implemented correctly, and which open us up for all sorts of patent litigation, hoping that if we can implement them better than MS, then everyone will switch.

The reason we don't have games is that major companies are not interested in us. You can implement D3D, and they STILL won't be interested in us. You'll be stuck running things through (half-working) emulation layers and wondering why everyone isn't switching, while the companies are developing for that other platform and you're stuck playing catch-up. The same story for the last 10 years, and people still don't learn.

Any company which releases games for consoles and PC can EASILY make Linux ports, as long as they plan properly from the beginning. Linux is FAR more similar to Windows than PS3 is. They don't want to do it, because they don't care. And even with a fake windows environment that implements half of the Windows userspace libraries, they still won't care.

Heh... Couldn't have said that any better if I'd tried.

Keep repeating those last two paragraphs folks. It's not a lost cause, mind- but...

Having WINE will not make things better. It's been around for more than a DECADE and hasn't really made all that much of a difference in the positive like people keep trying to paint it as being.

Having D3D isn't going to be any different and presents a potential litigation target. As a curiosity and something to rub people's noses in, it's kind of a neat idea. As a solution to anything in the Linux space, it's not so much one.

[Svartalf]

Here's another. Broadcom recently released native drivers for Linux despite ndiswrapper being a workable solution. Not much different than Wine, really. Why did they bother? Why didn't they just tell their users to use the "emulator"?

Oh, the drivers sort of worked well enough with ndiswrapper (WINE for drivers, after a fashion...). They didn't do it out of the kindness of their little old black hearts- they did it because a majority stake holder told them to do it. I'll leave it as an exercise as to whom I might be referring to. If you're clever enough and your Google-fu is strong, you'll figure out whom that might be.

[Svartalf]

a) stable hardware platform to develop for (neither has Windows, but situation with the drivers is much better on Windows than on Linux - see recent KDE woes for example).

Really? What's this?

http://beagleboard.org/hardware-xM

b) stable software platform to develop for (basically you can only target glibc, stdc++ and xlib... everything else you will have to bundle with your game - provided that licenses permit this)

Really? I guess what I'm doing is a fantasy and doesn't exist.

Caster's shipping with this.
Cortex Command's about to go into beta this weekend with it.

c) decent developer tools which would cater to Windows developers (that is, minimal commandline usage, everything integrated within single IDE, etc)

I'll give you that...for now. (Emphasis on the "for now"...it doesn't exist now...but, perhaps in another couple of months when I find a bit more time to refine what I've done...)

[movieman]

Having WINE will not make things better. It's been around for more than a DECADE and hasn't really made all that much of a difference in the positive like people keep trying to paint it as being.

Wine has meant that I haven't had to boot into Windows in a month; that's a big improvement from the situation with Linux a few years ago.

[Svartalf]

Wine has meant that I haven't had to boot into Windows in a month; that's a big improvement from the situation with Linux a few years ago.

Ah, but it hasn't made those games officially supported for you- or a whole range of applications (like Tax prep software, for example...) either.

There's a few notable exceptions where they'll kind of try to support you- but in the end, unless you're running on Windows, you're really NOT their customer regardless of what you might think you have bought from whom...

[RealNC]

Wine has done nothing for me though. I still boot to Windows. Wine simply can't keep up with running the games within a real Windows installation.

[Melcar]

Look, I like WINE (though I don't use it), and I respect the effort that goes in there, as it does help some people run software they absolutely need. It's good to have such an option around, as a last resort.

But calling for Linux to be a graveyard of poorly implemented MS technologies just so kids can play their gamez without having to reboot is shite, and people like that should please go and kill some other operating system instead.

As long as companies do not develop native applications, software on Linux will always be poor, will perform poorly, and will be unsupported and unimportant. No amount of faking Windows is going to change this.

WINE is a last resort, not the direction Linux should be heading in. Screw Windows, screw .Net, screw MS Office formats, screw Silverlight, screw Direct3d. As soon as you make any of this work (poorly), they will introduce a new technology which won't work, and everybody will switch to that. They've been doing this shit for 15 years, and you're still falling for it.

Open standards, and open source whenever possible.

This.

Seriously. Having D3Dwhatever on Linux won't do anything, much like WINE hasn't done anything. Having the option is always welcomed, but in the end it's more harm than good. And yeah, every time I hear "hardcore gamerz" and what not state "I will completely switch to Linux once all my games run" makes me want to punch them.

Wine has done nothing for me though. I still boot to Windows. Wine simply can't keep up with running the games within a real Windows installation.

I can count the times I have used WINE in the last 3 years with one hand. Sometimes there is a specific program (besides games) that you need to run and sometimes you luck out when it runs. A last resort, but sometimes you're better off digging around for alternatives than hacking away at WINE.