Wine Support On Chrome OS Is Unlikely

[grege]

Ridiculous Concept

Anyone with the faintest idea of what a Chromebook or Chromebox is would laugh at the suggestion of running Windows programs in ChromeOS. Or even wanting to.

What you can do is run remote Windows programs via remote desktop apps and thus use ChromeOS as a thin client. Or Linux, Mac or any other OS for that matter.

VMWare has announced this solution and I can see a few companies going down this path.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/google-and-vmware-make-accessing-windows-apps-desktops-from-chromeos-easier/

Most criticism of ChromeOS is from people who just don't get it. ChromeOS was never meant to be a general OS like Windows. It is a secure client for the internet or internal network. Google continually add new apps and a handful of offline apps for file management and photo and media management. Beyond that it is all "online".

If that is not what you want then do not buy one.

My Acer Chromebook works very well as a secondary device to my desktop. Everything nicely synced. It updates itself and boots in a few seconds. It is a perfect grab and go device with no effort involved in maintaining it.

[mitcoes]

With CROUTON works

With CROUTON wine works - at non X86 models not

The problem is to make it work as an app

But there are a lot of GNU apps that do not work as extensions

Qemu would be even better than wine. You would be able to run DOS / MS WOS / GNU/ Linux / or even Android sandboxed

[Calinou]

Yes, they could run Windows Solitaire in the recent demo. On the plus side, it's probably still more responsive than a Java solitaire

Java is, on average, 10% to 30% slower than C or C++. Wine is likely to be slower than that -- it's also more overhead.

[curaga]

This sounds like performance nightmare, especially on mobile devices. But I guess it can have some uses.

Yes, they could run Windows Solitaire in the recent demo. On the plus side, it's probably still more responsive than a Java solitaire

[newwen]

And this is one of the reasons why Chrome OS can't be mainstream, even if all applications are made offline. It's made for the cloud, very secure, but with the sandboxed approach model, the available APIs are very limited. If I'm not mistaken, another big limitation (for security reasons) is that chrome apps (as any HTML5 app) have their own sandboxed filesystem storage, but can't access the global filesystem.

Android at least exposes Linux syscalls.

Chrome OS with Android APIs (thus, running apps on the Android Dalvik/Art RT instead of sanboxing as a chrome process) would offer a much more capable system.

[shmerl]

I remember reading that they're working on interfacing with QEMU to run x86 software on arm.

This sounds like performance nightmare, especially on mobile devices. But I guess it can have some uses.

[Spittie]

How can Wine work on ARM? It doesn't emulate a CPU and can run code only on x86. Unless I misunderstood something. If this all is about x86 then it's another story. Doesn't ChromeOS allow installing extra packages in developer mode? It's essentially a custom Gentoo. So why wouldn't Wine work there?

I remember reading that they're working on interfacing with QEMU to run x86 software on arm.
And yes, this is about running Wine as a Chrome plugin. Once you enable developer mode, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

[andyprough]

ChromeOS sucks anyway. Better solution would be to replace it with Ubuntu, but I hear that's hard to do.

Xubuntu seems to be working well on the Acer C720, complete with Steam.
http://www.reddit.com/r/chrubuntu/co...the_acer_c720/

Here's one list of working Steam games (including, funny enough, Skyrim on Wine at 15-20 fps):
http://www.reddit.com/r/Crouton/comm...p_etc_through/

[masterreflector]

I have to disagree on your comment

Who would anyone want to have WINE made for Chrome OS? I think Google could get into legal trouble with Microsoft if WINE is included in Chrome OS.

1. wine on mac's? microsoft have not suse apple at all!

2. wine is not supported by google it is open source and supported/hosted by code weaver

3. when an application/software is made the developer/owner or he/she will go though the legal stuff not the platform the it's based on?

[shmerl]

How can Wine work on ARM? It doesn't emulate a CPU and can run code only on x86. Unless I misunderstood something. If this all is about x86 then it's another story. Doesn't ChromeOS allow installing extra packages in developer mode? It's essentially a custom Gentoo. So why wouldn't Wine work there?