The Features To Look Forward To With Wine 3.0

[johanb]

I don't use WINE because I like my system to be a pure x64 installation without any 32bit libraries. That means not enabling multiarch on Debian-based distributions, and never pulling any *.i686 packages in RPM-based distributions. Which makes WINE all but useless in my computer.

Pity, because I want to play some old eroge that I bought some four years ago. Only works on Windows, but I don't want to pay for Windows, so I'll do the right thing and live without it (no pirating).

Firstly, you could install a lightweight linux distro in a VM to run lightweight wine games if you don't want to make your root dirty with 32-bit libraries and don't care about HDD space.

Secondly, screw you for making me google "eroge" while at work.

[timofonic]

Firstly, you could install a lightweight linux distro in a VM to run lightweight wine games if you don't want to make your root dirty with 32-bit libraries and don't care about HDD space.

Secondly, screw you for making me google "eroge" while at work.

It's funny you didn't know the term eroge. If someone saw it, just say him you were doing some advanced research about an interesting project with that codename

Back to topic!


What I want in Wine 3+:

- Massive refactoring from C89 to C++17+. Seriously, compiler compatibility isn't a good enough excuse anymore (I did read their wiki stuff and such before writing this) and Wine's supported platforms have modern compilers.
* This will make code a lot more attractive for newcomers and more sane development. Seriously, it seems the Windows source code itself is written in better code form than Wine and that's shameful.
- Complete overhaul of their infrastructure:
* Use of GitLab instead this obsolete and unmaintained crappy bugzilla: Debian, Gnome and lots other FOSS projects are switching to GitLab.
* Make their Git web interface look more like this (GitHub mirror with a bunch of ignored Pull Requests, too bad) instead of this................... ABSOLUTE CRAP.
* have everything mirrored (PRs, bugs, etc) in GitHub for greater project visibility.
* Total use of massively automated testing and other modern development stuff: CI, fuzzy testing, automated testing of software (it's a bit hairy, but possible by recording mouse and keyboard events somewhat like done in videogames). I know they have testing stuff, but I mean more automation and more advanced tools.

(put here some stuff I may missed and Wine needs to become a more modern and better project, but not say about rewriting it in Rust please...)

[Techwolf]

I'm playing Elder Scrolls Online (DX11 only game) on staging and it works flawlessly, to my surprise.

Did they fix the ground flicker?

[Dukenukemx]

I think that deciding development priorities and directions based on the capabilities of 6-7 years old hardware is a huge mistake. And mind you, we are talking about graphics cards, which typically do not work on till the end of times.
Any owners still on HD 5000-6000 and GTX 400-500 (or even older) series cards should already be contemplating an upgrade based on raw performance alone.
These cards typically have 1-2GB RAM at most, and you can replace them with better performing models from the current low-end.
Also, with most of these older cards having been used for 6-7 years, their reliability is a crapshot by this time.

Unfortunately, a lot of people still use them. Though I don't know how long people will continue to use them, but I imagine so long as they can. It doesn't change the fact that a Gallium Nine like approach is probably the best way to go about this. Besides for better performance for older cars, there's also better performance for newer cards. Like it or not, DX11 to Vulkan is still going to be slower than a pure windows approach. But a Gallium Eleven approach could be just as good.

Of course the issue here is that Intel will never make a Gallium driver and Nvidia will never help with an open source driver.

[Michael_S]

consider not giving them money next time

You're right, of course. I got into the game Starcraft before I knew what Linux was, and it remains one of my favorite PC games ever. So even though I had abandoned Windows at home around 2008 or 2009, when Starcraft 2 came out I went against my principles and got Windows just to revisit the game.

0 A.D., Warzone 2100, and Glest (and its derivatives) are fun free software real time strategy games, and I enjoy them more than most other proprietary real time strategy games I've played. But Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are, in my humble opinion, in a class all their own.

[Michael_S]

It's funny you didn't know the term eroge. If someone saw it, just say him you were doing some advanced research about an interesting project with that codename

Back to topic!


What I want in Wine 3+:

- Massive refactoring from C89 to C++17+. Seriously, compiler compatibility isn't a good enough excuse anymore (I did read their wiki stuff and such before writing this) and Wine's supported platforms have modern compilers.
* This will make code a lot more attractive for newcomers and more sane development. Seriously, it seems the Windows source code itself is written in better code form than Wine and that's shameful.
- Complete overhaul of their infrastructure:
* Use of GitLab instead this obsolete and unmaintained crappy bugzilla: Debian, Gnome and lots other FOSS projects are switching to GitLab.
* Make their Git web interface look more like this (GitHub mirror with a bunch of ignored Pull Requests, too bad) instead of this................... ABSOLUTE CRAP.
* have everything mirrored (PRs, bugs, etc) in GitHub for greater project visibility.
* Total use of massively automated testing and other modern development stuff: CI, fuzzy testing, automated testing of software (it's a bit hairy, but possible by recording mouse and keyboard events somewhat like done in videogames). I know they have testing stuff, but I mean more automation and more advanced tools.

(put here some stuff I may missed and Wine needs to become a more modern and better project, but not say about rewriting it in Rust please...)

You're being unfair to the Wine team. At best the project has had a few million dollars of backing over its entire lifetime from Codeweavers and similar projects. Microsoft has billions of dollars for developers. The quality of Wine is outstanding when compared to Windows on a per-dollar and per-man-hour basis.

A rewrite from C89 to C++17+ is probably an unbelievably huge step. That might be nearly as much work as the entire project has accomplished so far. But admittedly the last time I used C and C++ it was C89 and C++98.

We use Gitlab at work and while the interface is gorgeous the memory requirements are outrageous. I haven't done a deep drive into gogs.io, Kallithea, GitBucket, GitPrep, and so forth but I bet at least one is a better choice than GitLab.

More automated testing is awesome, of course. But for instance my professional experience with continuous integration in the form of Jenkins is that it's fragile. I mean that tests and jobs often break or hang for reasons unrelated to compiler errors or test failure. "Oh, a system update moved the expected button 26 pixels left, so the test is clicking a blank portion of the page." "There was a firewall hiccup in the middle of the test, it hung for two days on a timed out TCP connection until someone noticed." "The test VM disk ran out of space." "VM 19 was corrupt and we cloned a replacement, but nobody updated the SSH host keys so all of the automated deployments fail." etc... etc...

[pal666]

A rewrite from C89 to C++17+ is probably an unbelievably huge step.

it was not huge step for gcc or gdb, so it wouldn't be huge step for wine. because it is not a rewrite, it can happen gradually

[timofonic]

it was not huge step for gcc or gdb, so it wouldn't be huge step for wine. because it is not a rewrite, it can happen gradually

Finally someone got it! :O

[ssorgatem]

Did they fix the ground flicker?

What ground flicker?

I guess so, then, I haven't experienced it ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

[Staffan]

But does it run World of Tanks? WoT has been broken in Wine for a year now. I'd like to play it again but I can't be bothered to set up a Windows installation.

edit: I just tried it and it turns out the latest version actually does run! Great!