Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-spell-windows-without-win dept.

The Wine team has announced that version 2.0 of the Windows compatibility layer has been released.

The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.

[...] This is the first release made on the new time-based, annual release schedule. This implies that some features that are being worked on but couldn't be finished in time have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes.

Do any soylentils still rely on Wine for that one irreplaceable application?


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:25PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:25PM (#458681)

    I realize it's more expensive than Wine's free-as-in-beer, but for my essential Windows apps I need for work, I use a Windows install on a VM. It's a lot less setup headache, less troubleshooting. I use Parallels myself, have used VMWare in the past. I know many people who use a similar approach.

    There was a time when WINE was the best (only?) game in town for that one essential Windows app on a Linux box or Mac. But over the last 5 years, VM approaches like the one I used have become mostly painless as an end user product. If you need to run something in Windows, you can run it in "real" Windows.

    I guess my question is who WINE is really for these days. Is it a matter of price? A matter of principle of not using Microsoft? Something elsE? What's the market niche WINE still occupies? I'm willing to believe there is one - I'm just seeing myself as someone who has issues I once needed WINE to solve, and now have what I consider better solutions. So I'm curious what the killer use case is nowadays.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:32PM (#458687)

      I use Parallels myself

      Let me guess, you're one of these Mac using faggots who are always spamming up the tech support forums whining because their program doesn't work perfectly on Mac, or their program doesn't support mice with only one button, or their program keeps crashing on Mac and WHEN IS THIS ISSUE GOING TO BE ADDRESSED???? Well you paid twice as much for the privilege of being different. Guess what - you're different. Suck it up.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:36PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:36PM (#458688)

      Gaming, with varying degrees of success. By far it's the single source of applications where high-performance requirements are pitiful when run on a VM*. I use it for whatever I can actually get working, and I have wineskin set up on the girlfriend's mac for Stick of Truth. I've had pretty good luck with popular, older games, but it's been disappointing on anything new or not very well known enough for anyone to have spent time trying to get it to work.

      * Okay, so niche applications that need direct access to GPU like bitcoin miners and stuff like market data systems can't run on VMs either. But a lot of those have linux and windows versions available.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:40PM

        by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:40PM (#458726) Journal

        > [...] applications that need direct access to GPU like bitcoin miners [...]

        Mining Bitcoin with GPUs is still a thing?

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:45PM

          by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:45PM (#458729) Journal

          I know right. Haven't they moved on to quantum ASICKO cereal clusters yet?

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:54PM

          by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:54PM (#458733)

          Hey, it was the first mainstream example of a GPU being used for something other than gaming that came to mind.

          --
          Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
          • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:51PM

            by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:51PM (#459046) Homepage Journal
            If there are still people doing it, you are not responsible for their cluelessness. :)
            --
            ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:40PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:40PM (#458693)

      I'm not firing up a VM to edit a few code files in Notepad++.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:51PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:51PM (#458699)

      Not being spied upon is certainly one. It's also a lot lighter than installing Windows in a VM. Have you seen how frikkin' big Windows is these days? It's also generally faster as the OS is not busy downloading and installing updates, sending "telemetry", or doing who knows what to the registry. I'm always amazed at the difference in disk activity in Windows versus Linux on the same machine. Linux never even flickers where Windows will have the disk light on continually ... pretty much at all times.

      That said, I've tried to get RockSmith2014 running under both and neither has worked, although I actually got closer in Wine.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:21AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:21AM (#458781)

        [WINE is] also generally faster

        Your comment could be seen as a follow-on/mate to the comment by super_bob, currently directly above yours and posted a few minutes before yours.

        Now I'm wondering if any Soylentils have made a comparison of the speed of any particular app running via WINE relative to that app running under Windoze.
        I have heard that some calls to WINE are actually executed faster than the same calls to Redmond's OS.
        (Years ago, I was able to make a clean break from anything MICROS~1, so I have no occasion/inclination to give this a try on my box.)

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:57AM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:57AM (#458788)

          I'm taking into account the system load taken on by running Windows in a VM. This relates to it being a pig in general, and also to what I mentioned about it beating the crap out of the disk. I would guess that most applications run at a similar speed, tending toward running faster under Windows *natively*, although I as well have heard that some things do run faster under Wine.

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:40AM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:40AM (#458796) Homepage Journal

          As someone who's done a lot of work on both, I'll put in my two cents. In general, I/O operations on Linux are considerably faster in my experience when taking account same hardware and same filesystems (or raw read/writes); for network performance alone, Linux generally has the edge. In terms of GPU performance, DirectX tends to wipe the floor with OpenGL equivelents on Linux. Part of this is likely due to driver quality and such, but I've seen even "tuned" Linux drivers provided by vendors fail miserably when compared to Windows performance.

          I've also noticed that IPC operations/message passing tends to be on the whole faster on Windows, likely due to the reliance on Win32 using named pipes, and other IPC mechanisms. Linux on the other hand tends to use file/socket-based I/O systems which requires a round-trip through the kernel. I don't have raw numbers to back me up but this is my general experience with both.

          --
          Still always moving
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:44AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:44AM (#458799)

            Hell, I just started a raw diet, throw those numbers at me!

        • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:21PM

          by DECbot (832) on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:21PM (#458920) Journal

          I can't say about WoW now, but about 10 years ago WoW had a faster FPS on WINE than Windows on the same box.

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:51PM (#458730)

      winbox --- the only .exe i use

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:06AM (#458743)

      Large corporations that are switching to Linux desktops have always some cruft left that is just impossible to get working on alternatives and they are switching from Windows for a reason so they absolutely don't want to keep maintaining (and paying licenses) for Windows which are running on VMs.

      I have personally witnessed the horror of trying to export/recode Excel macros to Open Office. They ended up installing CodeWeavers CrossOver Office (commercially supported WINE MS Office set up) for everyone that needed those macros.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:33AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:33AM (#458784)

        The guys in Munich hit this problem early on and developed (GPL'd) WollMux. [google.com]
        Have you heard of that?
        Did you give it a try?

        ...and OxygenOffice (a fork of OO.o, affiliated with SuSE) had decent M$Orifice macro compatibility for the most-commonly-used VBA stuff a bunch of years back.
        The OO.o guys were resistant to incorporating that stuff, but the LibreOffice guys jumped on that like a duck on a june bug.
        It seems clear that your efforts were before that fork.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:33PM (#459038)

          No, those macros were doing some internal business logic and had to import data from external databases and after doing their stuff export some to some other systems etc.

          Maybe that OxygenOffice could have worked but I doubt, they went with RHEL anyway so no hope for even trying it.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:07AM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:07AM (#458744) Homepage Journal

      Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and Diablo 2. Oh and Rosetta Stone when I can remember to bother with it.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:37AM

      by edIII (791) on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:37AM (#458753)

      "Real" Windows costs money, and VMs are not cheap and easy to maintain. I doubt everyone can manage their own KVM/VMware pools of hardware very well, so for the average person that leaves you with VPS that support Windows. All of those cost extra to a significant degree. In other words, I ain't paying $16-20/mo just so that it is a Windows instance when everything else is the base rate.

      The new Windows, and any Windows 7 with updates turned on, are telemetry nodes. All in the name of providing greater services (Cortana) Microsoft is transmitting as much data as possible outside of the system back to Microsoft and affiliates. They were caught sharing that data with IP collectives that like to sue people. They don't want to be left behind now that Amazon is literally listening 24/7 inside some people's homes.

      With other operating systems and devices I can exact some measure of control over the flow of information, but Microsoft has become a bit too intense about it. You can't be sure whether or not the telemetry is really off without wasting a whole lot of time analyzing packets and dealing with critical updates outside of the Windows Update channels.

      For some people telemetry is a deal breaker. I honestly don't know how Microsoft can expect Corporate America to just share all their business data with them. Enter WINE, which can help people use some Microsoft applications that cannot be migrated to Linux equivalents. WINE is just duct tape anyways. ReactOS will mature to the point it can emulate the entire Windows subsystems, but deliver the transparency that FOSS allows and my principles require.

      Windows is actually dying at this point, at least in tech arena. Some of us may still support Windows 10, but the vast majority of us are now looking for a different solution to offer people. Microsoft has very little good will left with IT.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:02AM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:02AM (#458833) Journal

        Uhhh just FYI you can get Windows 10 for free now [windows.com] which if all you are wanting to use it for is gaming or running some Windows only program? Meh works good enough for that role.

        Personally I'll stick with win 7 until the "Win 10 Pirate edition" comes out with all the adware/spyware stripped out. I already have the Win 8.1 Pirate Edition but I haven't seen anything 8.1 does that 7 doesn't so I haven't bothered upgrading and hopefully Vulkan will win the API before Win 7 hits EOL and I'll have no reason to have to deal with win 10 outside of work, pirate edition or not.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:23PM

          by edIII (791) on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:23PM (#459150)

          Why do that though? Why fight Microsoft so hard for the privacy and dignity we deserve while computing with our devices that we own?

          Failure is catastrophic. Once you fail to protect yourself, once the pirates fail (even once) to turn off telemetry, Microsoft has all of your data. All of your keystrokes. Every single thing you ask Cortana for help with. I dunno about you, but that seems like a losing battle. Or at least one in which you may be running a possibly compromised operating system.... either by the pirates or Microsoft. It's not like Microsoft cloud data is zero knowledge or anything. Far from it, they peruse that data to offer you "enhanced services".

          At this point we need to pick our battles. I think we need to push as hard as possible for another operating system that can handle both games and work. Linux is getting better every single day for supporting games natively, and projects like WINE and ReactOS will ultimately make it possible to have an alternate Microsoft-like environment to run programs. For older retro gaming, there is nothing realistically stopping us from running Windows XP in a dedicated VM, or waiting for ReactOS to mature sufficiently to run all older programs natively.

          Normally, I would agree with you. Since Microsoft is attacking Business Data, and as a BUSINESS, I'm forced to surrender my Business Data to an untrusted and untrustworthy vendor.... well... the only options now are non-Microsoft options. If I'm going to have to work that hard for business reasons, I'm sure as hell not going to keep Microsoft going in my personal life too.

          --
          Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
          • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Hairyfeet on Friday January 27 2017, @07:18AM

            by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday January 27 2017, @07:18AM (#459357) Journal

            Because Linux is a server OS and Apple sucks just as hard? I'm sorry but Linux is a shitty desktop OS, its support for the latest hardware is poor (and its support for older hardware frankly ain't that great) and the reason why is obvious...servers don't need support for desktop hardware. If you look at the amount of money spent on Linux and who spends it? Its Red Hat, HP, VM hosting companies....all corps that need servers NOT desktops.

            Hell Linux still doesn't have features that Windows introduced with XP (where is a simple system restore for when an update goes bad? Where is a simple rolback drivers button for when a driver craps out? Oh yeah it don't exist even after 17 fricking years) and as long as there is no way to make any money of Linux desktops? That isn't gonna change, even Canonical is more about cloud than desktop anymore.

            Does this make Linux worthless? Nope it makes a kick ass server, or if you want an embedded OS that isn't gonna be hooked to the net, like a media jukebox? Linux works wonderfully for that. But I'm sorry but the latest and greatest Linux doesn't have feature parity with windows and OSX from a decade ago, it isn't gonna compete with Windows or OSX, spyware or not. This is why Windows Pirate Edition will have more users in a month than Linux has had in 20 years, its just a better desktop.

            --
            ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
            • (Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Friday January 27 2017, @01:45PM

              by Aiwendil (531) on Friday January 27 2017, @01:45PM (#459442) Journal

              where is a simple system restore for when an update goes bad?

              Hit tab twice when "LILO" is showing was it the last time I had to do it (gives you a menu, select with arrows and enter)..
              Yeah, not been happening to me for that long (more than ten years).

              Where is a simple rollback drivers button for when a driver craps out? Oh yeah it don't exist even after 17 fricking years

              apt-get install package/stable
              -or-
              apt-get install package=version
              -or-
              dpkg -i fullnameandpathto.deb

              Some dists even has graphical package managers that you can get a list of all installed packages and pick which version you want of all that your machine are aware of - so yeah, it is there.

              But overall you're probably better off just doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or hitting "update" and then "upgrade" in your clicky-thing, same thing really) and not running testing, unstable nor experimental (ie - stick to stable) unless you are comfortable with reading and following instructions.

              So, it is there - just that you need to know that you are doing a downgrade (you know, the antonym of "upgrade") or an install of a specific version when you search for it.

              • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday January 27 2017, @01:49PM

                by Aiwendil (531) on Friday January 27 2017, @01:49PM (#459445) Journal

                Sorry if it came off a bit hard - spent parts of last month with tellung people (over phone) to click on icons that they insisted wasn't there despite them listing them when asked to list what they see. One of the issues was indeed solved with the update/upgrade.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:04AM

      by Marand (1081) on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:04AM (#458779) Journal

      I guess my question is who WINE is really for these days. Is it a matter of price? A matter of principle of not using Microsoft? Something elsE? What's the market niche WINE still occupies?

      Some things to consider:

      • First, the elephant in the room: games. Gaming in a VM is possible if your hardware supports GPU passthrough and you jump through the necessary hoops to make it happen, but it's not available to all and it's quite a bit more work than wine, especially with things like PlayOnLinux assisting with game setup.
      • You can attempt to emulate different versions of Windows without owning them all, and you don't have to worry about the different licensing rules of each. It's sometimes useful to pretend to be Windows 98 for old software installs, for example.
      • You can isolate programs with their own separate environments via the WINEPREFIX environment variable. This is much lighter (RAM, disk space, CPU) than running separate Windows VMs for every application.
      • Each WINEPREFIX can have wildly differing configurations. Seamless windows, a fake desktop, different .NET versions, different sets of supporting software, different Windows versions, etc.
      • If you're using a separate WINEPREFIX per application, it's less of a problem if applications misbehave vs. using a single VM for multiple Windows apps.
      • You can also just delete the WINEPREFIX directory and it's completely gone, no leftover cruft like you tend to get with Windows app uninstalls.
      • Data sharing among WINEPREFIXes (and the OS itself) can be much more seamless than among VMs if desired. For example, I have multiple WINEPREFIXes pointing to a single Steam install so that I can manage Steam and game updates in one place, but use different wine configurations for games that have different needs.
      • Inversely, it's also easy to isolate specific applications by removing access to anything but a WINEPREFIX's virtual c:
      • Better OS integration. When an installer attempts to create various system shortcuts, wine quietly turns them into proper wine shortcuts for use by your environment. These launcher entries even retain your WINEPREFIX settings, so you don't have to constantly micro-manage them unless you want to.
      • Unlike a Windows VM, you don't have to deal with an entire second operating system's updates. Starting a Windows VM sporadically means every attempt to use it results in being bombarded with OS updates and VM reboots. This gets even worse if you run multiple VMs, whereas Wine is updated through a single central installation and only has to update some supporting software (Mono) occasionally.
      • Works better with certain types of hardware, like graphics tablets. If you want to use, say, Photoshop with a graphics tablet, doing so with wine is much more convenient. With a VM you have to use USB passhtrough, which means you can't use it in the host OS at all during that time.

      The only reason I don't use wine is if whatever I want to use doesn't work correctly. It's always the first thing I try before resorting to a VM or dual-boot, and cost has nothing to do with it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:36AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:36AM (#458848)

        Nerdfest and edIII have both mentioned Telemetry.
        Now even Hairyfeet has mentioned the spyware.

        Rich (945) has mentioned LTspice.
        If I was still working, that would probably be on my list.

        Windoze on bare metal? Absolutely not.
        I don't have the time to figure out how to constantly adapt and outmaneuver a software supplier who puts MY best interests LAST.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:23AM (#458792)

      XP - in a VM, stayed up.
      Win7 - in a VM, self-destructed.

      Wine is welcome with v2.0, IF stuff works. I have several applications that I would like to run despite the passage of time. Setup with Wine so far was a nightmare, so hopefully 2.0 fixes a lot of that.

      As for "Wine 2.0 released" ... I consider it "released" when I see it in the official repository and updates for my distro.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:58AM (#458849)

      How is running Windows in a VM less trouble shooting? A VM stops neither malware, nor Windows Update changing settings to useless defaults.

      If the answer is "you can just wipe the VM without touching the rest of the system, then we are back to the argument about a lot less setup headache. Because there is a lot of that every time one reinstalls Wiindows.

      Of course Wine is not immune to malware, it's rare to hear people getting Wine infected, and the few cases I have heard about have been deliberate attempts. And the situation will get worse as compatibility gets better. But Wine IS immune to Windows Update, something that has caused a ton of problems lately, with updates that break Windows, good and bad updates bundled together in "rollup" updates, and even unauthorized updates to Windows "Surface Edition", aka. Windows 10.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:17PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:17PM (#459202) Journal

      Even if you regularly use a native Windows install Wine is still useful. I once even attempted (unsuccessfully) to get Wine running on native Windows -- because there's a lot of old Windows apps that Wine will still run, but modern versions of Windows won't (And I'm including XP as "modern", and yes I've tried all the "comparability mode" settings which as far as I can tell do more harm than good). Sure, you could go try to pirate a Win9x copy and hope it's clean and fire it up in a VM, but why bother with all of that when it works just as well -- if not better (acts like a native app) in Wine?

      I haven't installed a Windows VM in a few years. I used Wine just last night. VMs are great for servers, but for desktop use they're still pretty awful. If you really have absolutely no other choice they'll get the job done, but if you can use something like Wine you'll undoubtedly have a better experience. It's got better compatibility, better hardware access, and you don't have to jump through hoops if you need to share files with the host system.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:56PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 25 2017, @10:56PM (#458705) Homepage Journal

    Even though Adobe promised it would provide a Linux version when the publishers chose to use Adobe's copy protection scheme for epub books, Adobe never did. I need it to download custom ebooks. When I use Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe is so kind as to custom-encrypt the books for just me. Once I have downloaded a book, I can have my way with it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:17AM (#458846)

      This, though lately, it's gotten flakey on me: spinning forever and never downloading the actual book. I guess I'll have to try 2.0 and a fresh install.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:56PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday January 25 2017, @11:56PM (#458736) Homepage
    We work in language services, and fortunately our clients are also happier with (or tied to) older .doc formats, so we're still using CrossOver Office (a commercial extension to Wine) from about 2004 for - get this - Office '97. Works fine, better than any subsequent version, no need to change. Nice and zippy on the ~2006-era hardware. (I think many of the clients have migrated to Office ~2003, but that's happy to read our '97 files)
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:29AM (#458783)

      Good to know that Linux & Crossover (or WINE) is an option for me in the future.

      I'm still using Office '97, have managed to install it on Win7 without too many error messages. My amateur workaround is to get Win7 updated to some reasonable state and then turn off updates completely, then install Office '97. Before that I ran Office '97 for years on XP. Couple of reasons -- one, I believe it's the last version of Office that doesn't call home to MS. Also, it's blazing fast and generally reliable on more recent hardware.

      I started using Office '97 when a customer demanded it...in 1998, and it was horrible back then. 50-100 page Word docs with embedded pictures or equations could take minutes to save or would just crash, losing data. I think having much more memory must make Word happy?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:48AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:48AM (#458786)

        I started using Office '97 when a customer demanded it...in 1998

        Have you tried those documents using a FOSS app?
        Is there something about the gratis and libre stuff that hasn't achieved compatibility with the 20 year old proprietary app?

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:10AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:10AM (#458805)

          > Is there something about the gratis and libre stuff that hasn't achieved compatibility with the 20 year old proprietary app?

          Yes, layered figures often display incorrectly, missing layers. This is true for .doc files created on Word which I try to open with Open Office. These are engineering figures pasted in from Matlab, sometimes they have many thousands of data points (100K?--I haven't counted, but redisplay in Word can take a second or two). Don't ask me, the customer wants it this way.

          Our 1998 customer insisted we use MathType (add-in to Word) for equations with picky formatting. The built-in MS-Equation Editor is a limited version of MathType, both from the same supplier. Word isn't perfectly compatible between versions, so it's just easier to stick with one version. By now I have internalized work-arounds for the problems/bugs that I used to have with Word-97.

          I just read a comment above that Libre Office might be better and I'll be trying that at some point.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:22AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:22AM (#458847)

            OpenOffice has been dead since the Oracle acquisition of SUN.

            Try LibreOfiice, which is the fork where the development has been happening for the last 5 (10?) years.

          • (Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday January 26 2017, @08:44AM

            by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Thursday January 26 2017, @08:44AM (#458858)

            20 year too late, but I heard LaTeX is good for equations (I normally used a GUI called "lyx": a "What you see is what you mean" editor.

            • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 27 2017, @09:59AM

              by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday January 27 2017, @09:59AM (#459402) Homepage
              A lot of our clients are academics, so we still get quite a lot of LaTeX jobs. I forget if my g/f uses LyX or TeXmacs for editing those. As a last resort, of course, there's always emacs. We like those clients, we don't just send the final files to them, we send the 'diff's for their quick review, which they appreciate. So infinitely more advanced than any document revision control in any office suite I know of.
              --
              Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by damnbunni on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:36AM

    by damnbunni (704) on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:36AM (#458772) Journal

    Some of GOG.com's Mac and Linux ports of games are the Windows version with a baked-in WINE wrapper.

    The Mac version of Evil Genius, for instance.

    That's how they offer Mac/Linux versions of games that only got Windows releases back when. Although they don't do it for all the games WINE can run, so I presume there are rights issues involved as well.

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:13AM

      by Marand (1081) on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:13AM (#458780) Journal

      It's not just gog's stuff. The version of System Shock 2 on Steam uses wine, and furthermore, wine gets used in some "native" game releases, at least indirectly. Some OS X ports of EA games (Sims 3 was one) used TransGaming's Cider for the port, for example, which was a proprietary wine fork. Parallels and VirtualBox both use wine code for their direct3d support as well.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:13AM (#458826)

      Arcacnum needs to come with Wine's version of the D3D libs as it doesn't run on modern Windows without it...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:39PM (#458932)

      How do they handle WINE (and dependencies)? Are they updated when security issues surface?

  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:20AM

    by Rich (945) on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:20AM (#458791) Journal

    Electronics simulation. Available for Windows and (somewhat lagging) Mac. Moved from Mac to Linux after my rMBP logic board crapped out in (a most annoying and expensive to fix) way. Even a more up-to-date version on Linux. The author makes sure that the software works neatly with Wine. Which it perfectly does (*). Complete desktop & menu integration. If it wasn't for the file selector box and the Windows-style icons, you'd think it's native.

    (*) My rant in the Eagle-now-clouded thread about the usability heritage of CAD software applies, though.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:53AM (#458872)

    Since gcc-msp430 doesn't space optimise well enough, we're stuck using a licensed IAR compiler. And to get decent build times, we do parallel builds on Linux using WINE. Quite the pain to get going with its !#!@#^ usb dongle, but in the end oh-so-worth the effort.

  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:19PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:19PM (#458877) Journal

    So one of the (thousands of) reasons I despise Windows is that it craps all over my disk. (I'm one of the few who believe it is my computer, it should obey me, not run off and do its own thing without my permission.)

    So I installed WINE, and it crapped all over my disk. Naturally. It is doing what Windows would do.

    With a VM, at least I can confine all that stuff to a single disk image file, where I can put it aside and wash my hands when I'm done.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday January 27 2017, @02:30PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday January 27 2017, @02:30PM (#459459)

      You can constrain WINE to a specific directory by disabling some of the default "drives": one of which is your home directory.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:43PM (#458906)

    So, is it still pollutes MIME associations with it's own programs and programs you'd install inside it?

    I know I can disable winemenubuilder with an environment variable but it's still dumb.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:30AM (#459337)

    Go native.