Wine 2.19 Released With Various Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 2.19 Released With Various Improvements

Wine 2.19 is available as the project's latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/programs on Linux and other operating systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-2.19-Released

[artivision]

Any idea for when Mono will replace Dotnet?

[uid313]

Any idea for when Mono will replace Dotnet?

Mono and .NET Framework is the past.
Now it's all about .NET Core.

[eydee]

Mono and .NET Framework is the past.
Now it's all about .NET Core.

All the thousands of existing .NET programs won't magically turn into the new thing.

[Hi-Angel]

Mono and .NET Framework is the past.
Now it's all about .NET Core.

I never cared of .net enough to find out what ".net core" is about, but given that Mono have a page about integration of the open sourced code, and they even complain there about about various technical difficulties (like possibly misssing code and access security checks that make no sense to their codebase), the two are not mutually exclusive.

[Vistaus]

I'm still confused to this day about that Gdi stuff. AFAIK Wine apps use OpenGL by default but I always see an option in Winetricks to switch to Gdi. What are the benefits of switching to Gdi?

[eydee]

What are the benefits of switching to Gdi?

Nothing. Wine is a very old project and OGL support wasn't guaranteed back in the days. It's for systems that have no proper support or are too buggy etc.

[Hi-Angel]

I'm still confused to this day about that Gdi stuff. AFAIK Wine apps use OpenGL by default but I always see an option in Winetricks to switch to Gdi. What are the benefits of switching to Gdi?

I don't know how up to date this (probably not, given you don't see gdi as default), but per this page:

By default Wine's DirectDraw uses GDI which in turn uses X but this way of rendering has certain performance problems.

[SNIP]

Using GetDC/ReleaseDC games can use standard GDI for drawing. The main problem is that all GDI drawing is done through X even offscreen drawing. Under normal conditions this already isn't nice as a roundtrip to the Xserver takes a short amount of time. It is especially problematic for games when there is a depth mismatch. All drawing operations need to be converted twice (first 16bit -> 24bit and then 24bit -> 16bit as the game uses e.g. 16bit).

[SNIP]

As has been pointed out DirectDraw's gdi renderer has performance problems due to depth conversion, the lack of direct framebuffer access and GetDC/ReleaseDC. I will move along each of the three bottlenecks and explain what OpenGL can offer. If you want to use OpenGL for DirectDraw, set DirectDrawRenderer to OpenGL.

[uid313]

All the thousands of existing .NET programs won't magically turn into the new thing.

True. But since both .NET Framework (the old .NET) and .NET Core (the new .NET) supports the .NET Standard 2.0 then it should be relatively easy to port software from .NET Framework to .NET Core.
Since they both support .NET Standard 2.0 they have a common API surface area.

I never cared of .net enough to find out what ".net core" is about, but given that Mono have a page about integration of the open sourced code, and they even complain there about about various technical difficulties (like possibly misssing code and access security checks that make no sense to their codebase), the two are not mutually exclusive.

.NET Core is the future of .NET.

.NET Framework was closed source and made explicitly for Windows. Later Mono re-implemented much of the API and later Microsoft open sourced parts of the .NET Framework such as ASP.NET and Entity Framework, then later they open sourced the whole .NET Framework.

.NET Core on the other hand was conceived from the start to be cross-platform with explicit support for Windows, Linux and macOS. While .NET Framework was monolithic, .NET Core is modular and more suitable for the cloud, embedded devices and IoT.

[JPFSanders]

then later they open sourced the whole .NET Framework.

No, they made the source available which is not the same as being open source, you can't make your own fork and distribute it.

Microsoft is nice only at the PR level.

It will be open source when it is released using GPL/Apache or BSD Licenses.

Until then in the words of the immortal admiral Ackbar: "IT's a trap!"