Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features

The Phoronix coverage so far from the Wine development track at FOSDEM 2013 includes Gaming On Wine: The Good and Bad Graphics Drivers, Support For Running Windows Apps On ARM With Wine, Wine-Mono Isn't Too Fit For .NET, and Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps. Another worthwhile Wine session was Alexandre Julliard's keynote...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI5ODQ

[Kano]

I would prefer when Wine would provide full dwrite support - i don't think it is a good idea to ship half-backed code that you have to disable for major apps like Steam...

[e8hffff]

Seems like they are listening to complaints.

[scionicspectre]

You know, this is all wonderful and great, but I really wish they could just get Adobe CS, 3ds Max, and those CAD programs working so more people could use Linux to work quickly without a VM like VMWare Player. Of course, the primary use of WINE will probably always be videogames, so it's useless to hope they'll focus on corporate apps.

I do long for the day when open source creative tools are accepted into work environments, as is currently happening with Blender, but it seems like it's a long way off- perhaps decades. Maybe those guys will port their apps to Linux in the coming years if Valve really helps us with popularizing it on production-grade machines. Gaming PCs are usually well above the minimum requirements for creative tools.

[Hamish Wilson]

Of course, the primary use of WINE will probably always be videogames, so it's useless to hope they'll focus on corporate apps.

While I do not doubt that the userbase's primary use of WINE may be for games, I was under the impression CodeWeaver's primary focus was actually on corporate apps and that most of the upstream contribtions to WINE from independant contributors were from other companies wishing to run said apps.

[scionicspectre]

Ah yes, that is true that Crossover Office is clearly not a gaming product. I suppose the WINE community (especially the Top 25 voted apps for compatibility) gave me a different impression. After all, MS Office 2010 works now, if memory serves me correctly.

[stefandoesinger]

You know, this is all wonderful and great, but I really wish they could just get Adobe CS, 3ds Max, and those CAD programs working so more people could use Linux to work quickly without a VM like VMWare Player.

The reasoning behind not putting effort into these programs is that they have license costs that go into the thousands of Dollars, so buying an extra Windows license to run them doesn't really matter.

Furthermore, given the cost, users will want 100% of the application's functionality to work, not 95%, and making them work to that degree requires a *lot* of work.

Fwiw, CrossOver isn't called "CrossOver Office" since about 7 years. It has support for lots of games these days, and CodeWeavers employs 4 people working on games(including myself).

[boltronics]

Kind of surprised to see that DirectX 10/11 isn't given a higher priority. With Windows XP extended support expiring in just over a year, I expect that soon we'll start to see many games dropping Windows XP compatibility and demanding DirectX 10+ to run.

[newwen]

Fwiw, CrossOver isn't called "CrossOver Office" since about 7 years. It has support for lots of games these days, and CodeWeavers employs 4 people working on games(including myself).

It would be nice if Steam and Codeweavers worked together to integrate Wine or CrossOver with Steam for Linux to enable working windows games without Linux ports (gold and platinum) to be able to be played right from Steam.

Most Steam users won't switch to other platforms because they already have purchased large game libraries that wouldn't be able to be played outside Windows, because let's be honest, those old games will never get ported to Linux.

It's my humble opinion that this would make a good business case for both Codeweavers and Valve. There should be someway to monetize that collaboration.

[stefandoesinger]

Kind of surprised to see that DirectX 10/11 isn't given a higher priority. With Windows XP extended support expiring in just over a year, I expect that soon we'll start to see many games dropping Windows XP compatibility and demanding DirectX 10+ to run.

<sarcasm>Kinda surprised that people tell free software projects what to do, rather than sit down and work on it themselves.</sarcasm>

Taunting aside, we're working on this. But we were told d3d10 is the ?ber-most-important thing in 2008. It's 2013 now, and DX10/11-only games are still the exception rather than the rule(Battlefield 3 is the most requested one among them).

Re Steam: We are aware of this.