Wine-Staging 3.20 Released, Fixes A Four Year Old Rendering Bug

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine-Staging 3.20 Released, Fixes A Four Year Old Rendering Bug

Building off Friday's release of Wine 3.20 is now Wine-Staging 3.20 with minor work added into this testing/experimental blend of Wine that tends to particularly suit gamers better than the upstream code-base...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-Staging-3.20-Released

[StandaSK]

Wouldn't call Spintires a racing game, it's more of a "mud simulator", but I digress.

[Michael_S]

Is it just me, or is the pace of Wine improvements increasing? The project is 25 years old but seems like things have been speeding up for the past ten.

I'm starting to wonder if the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be a 2020 or 2022 release that configures MATE/Xfce/LXQt/KDE/whatever to mimic the Windows 7 UI and supports Windows 7 or Windows 10 games and applications so well that 70% of users only figure out it's not Windows when they've run it for two years and never saw a Windows Update restart.

[boxie]

Is it just me, or is the pace of Wine improvements increasing? The project is 25 years old but seems like things have been speeding up for the past ten.

I'm starting to wonder if the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be a 2020 or 2022 release that configures MATE/Xfce/LXQt/KDE/whatever to mimic the Windows 7 UI and supports Windows 7 or Windows 10 games and applications so well that 70% of users only figure out it's not Windows when they've run it for two years and never saw a Windows Update restart.

maybe, but there is a long way to go yet before that could happen.

[Britoid]

Is it just me, or is the pace of Wine improvements increasing? The project is 25 years old but seems like things have been speeding up for the past ten.

I'm starting to wonder if the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be a 2020 or 2022 release that configures MATE/Xfce/LXQt/KDE/whatever to mimic the Windows 7 UI and supports Windows 7 or Windows 10 games and applications so well that 70% of users only figure out it's not Windows when they've run it for two years and never saw a Windows Update restart.

Wine is getting some commercial purposes behind it, money speeds things up and I thought KDE was already trying to mimic the Windows 7 UI.

[jo-erlend]

Wine is getting some commercial purposes behind it, money speeds things up and I thought KDE was already trying to mimic the Windows 7 UI.

More like the opposite in my opinion, considering KDE4x is older than Win7.

[kenjitamura]

Is it just me, or is the pace of Wine improvements increasing? The project is 25 years old but seems like things have been speeding up for the past ten.

I'm starting to wonder if the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be a 2020 or 2022 release that configures MATE/Xfce/LXQt/KDE/whatever to mimic the Windows 7 UI and supports Windows 7 or Windows 10 games and applications so well that 70% of users only figure out it's not Windows when they've run it for two years and never saw a Windows Update restart.

Maybe 2020 or 2022 would be feasible or even sooner if OEM's decided to ship out an already completely configured linux distro for that specific hardware. However, after the last week of having installed Kubuntu on my desktop I can say for certain that almost no Windows user would be willing to do even a fraction of what I had to do to get my system to this point. Wiped my SSD and installed Kubuntu on a custom built system and it took quite a bit to get even what should have been fairly basic out of the box configurations squared away.

For starters I found that although my USB 3.0 ports were all working none of my USB 2.0 ports were. Turns out my Gigabyte motherboard has a known issue with the linux kernel and it took a slight hack to get it working as expected in that regard: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....0#post12851570

That fix was fairly messy as it required enabling IOMMU in the bios which disabled the USB 3.0 support, setting a kernel boot parameter in grub, and then rebooting into the BIOS and disabling IOMMU in the BIOS to have both functioning 2.0 and 3.0 ports.

Additionally, I had kept my media hard drive left over from Windows with an NTFS file system and it initially didn't have any write support. It took an FSTAB entry:

UUID=72DEE0ABDEE06935  /media/Data  ntfs-3g  defaults,umask=7007,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names,locale=en_US.utf8  0 0

followed by the command:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

to get ntfs write support enabled.

There was also a problem where, despite using an SSD, the time it took from entering the login password to reaching the desktop was around one minute. Fixed that by removing snapd because I don't use any of those services and didn't want to figure out what configuration problem was happening there.

And I also decided to play a DX11 game with wine-staging and DXVK which took a few steps as well. Proton works for a lot of cases however in my specific instance I didn't have a steam key as Elder Scrolls Online doesn't provide steam keys for their game if it's purchased outside the steam store. So the installation process to get that running included installing the Padoka and Wine-staging PPA's, changing kernel boot parameters so that my R7 370 would use the amdgpu drivers instead of Radeon because Sea Island and Caribbean Island cards use Radeon by default, setting up the wineprefix with vcrun2010, and installing DXVK which included running a script and then manually setting a few DLL over rides in winecfg because the scripts for some reason weren't behaving correctly in that regard.

Lutris couldn't be used to install Elder Scrolls Online because is has a known issue with the non-steam version where the installer hangs.

None of this really seemed like a big deal to me because I've used Linux off and on for years and knew going into it stuff like this would happen. However I doubt any average Windows user would have had the patience to troubleshoot these problems which frankly don't exist even in a brand new Windows installation.

[beniwtv]

Maybe 2020 or 2022 would be feasible or even sooner if OEM's decided to ship out an already completely configured linux distro for that specific hardware. However, after the last week of having installed Kubuntu on my desktop I can say for certain that almost no Windows user would be willing to do even a fraction of what I had to do to get my system to this point. Wiped my SSD and installed Kubuntu on a custom built system and it took quite a bit to get even what should have been fairly basic out of the box configurations squared away.

I think most Windows users don't even install Windows; it comes preinstalled most of the time. Even if a reinstall is in order, OEM PCs have a purpose-built partition that can be used to reinstall Windows easily on that PC. So I agree, we need more OEMs preinstalling Linux.

As for your experiences with your mainboard, it goes the other way too. Not everyone has a bad experience. I did not have a single problem with the last 5 custom PCs I installed Linux-wise. Everything was working just fine OOTB - then again I use ASRock mainboards, because I know they have a good UEFI that works well with Linux.

And even on Windows, I have had to help people get things running when they manually installed it on a custom built PC. Sometimes that's just the way it is.

As for Proton and Wine - Proton is still young and Wine isn't yet the best OOTB experience either, I agree fully on that - an area I am sure will improve quickly, seeing how much more attention these are getting as of late.

[Michael_S]

kenjitamura - that's hilarious, I have the same Gigabyte motherboard and the same USB problems. I won't be buying Gigabyte again. All of the other machines where I installed Linux, everything worked. I haven't had slow boot problems in Ubuntu flavors, maybe that was a Kubuntu quirk?

I'm not trying to argue that Wine and Proton are such that a non-technical end user can jump from Windows to Linux today. I'm trying to argue that in a few years it might reach that point. I haven't even tried to switch over most of my friends and family because even if I did the install for them, they would run into behavior they didn't understand and didn't have the interest or patience to learn quickly. Or they would run into an application or game they wanted to use but could not.

But again, with the current pace of progress maybe in a few years it will reach the point that just about everything works out of the box. Then even if they lack the technical skill to do the install, they can find a Linux enthusiast to do it for them.

Guest perfect, thanks. I didn't realize those existed, I thought they would be subject to copyright lawsuits. I guess they're not popular enough for Microsoft to care?

Britoid KDE puts some of the features in the same places as Windows 7 or Windows 95, but the default programs menu layout is different and the Activities feature has no common Windows feature equivalent. For the Microsoft programs menu you click on the button and it pops up a vertical list of items, and then you scroll through the items and click to have it pop out the next level of items to the right, and then you scroll through that and click to launch an application or click out another nested menu an additional level to the right, and so forth. For KDE by default you click on the button and it pops up five large icons in a horizontal row with a vertical list of items on top. The vertical list on top functions almost identical to the one in Windows, but the five icons you click between for menu categories is different. It would take someone five seconds to learn the difference - but to use a stereotypical but true example my mother can't launch a web browser if you move the icon two inches in any direction from its previous location on screen. That's how closed off to changes in her user experience she is.