WINE Windows translation layer has matured like a fine... you get the picture The WINE Project has reached version 8.0 and DXVK version 2.1 of its Vulkan-based DirectX translation layer. If you'd give Linux a go except for one or two pesky but necessary apps, it's worth a try. Just over a year ago, we covered the release of WINE 7.0 and it's been working smoothly for us ever since. Now WINE 8.0 is here …
Gamers are lamers.
Most of us work for companies that actually have to make money - where you get conditioned to work the Microsnot/Snoracle/SAP way (COBOL almost makes me nostalgic).
The Java/XML/somethingScript/Json crowd is so full of stack it makes me want to vomit. (Oh, I forgot to mention Agile and DevSecOps. Sorry.)
No but you could probably run WINE under WSL and WSLg. I.e. the binary is running in Linux and rendering through Wayland but on Windows. Why? I suppose there might be ocassions where you have some Win32 app you can't install natively or don't trust to run so.
It might also be useful for devs who want to comparatively run the same binary natively vs through WINE so they debug or diagnose issues.
Believe it or not, there was a "port WINE to Windows" project (basically porting the UNIX end of WINE to Windows) under the stated goal of enabling Windows 95/98 apps to run on modern Windows (WINE has better compatibility for Windows 95/98 apps than modern Windows does). I am not referring to ReactOS but an actual port of WINE to Windows. Unfortunately, it was shut down and no trace exists of it today. Unfortunately, I don't have the exact link to search for it in Web Archive.
Care to offer an alternative that doesn't look like amateurs designed the UI?
Apple's programs are the only ones that get close, and Numbers is still a bit of a joke, nor is Keynote that great.
The only open source program that has come a long way in the 'office suite' area is Krita, and that only happened after they left the rest of the office suite.
I've learned how to create my own toolbar and hide the hated ribbon interface.
In my view, the ribbon interface is one of the worst UI antipatterns of all time, and I refuse to be cowed into using something that I consider so badly organised, ill thought out and counterproductive that it reeks of a deliberate attempt to make the product harder to use.
I'm all for good user interfaces. I know there's a tendency to "Fisher Price" everything, but the ribbon is the opposite of accessible - small icons with tiny text next to bigger icons with drop down menus? It's bad for touch interfaces, it's bad for desktop interfaces, it's bad for people who have to remember "what does the big icon mean", it's bad for people with poor eyesight who can't read the smaller text. There is literally no redeeming feature to the ribbon interface and I think it's genuinely one of the worst unnovations* that Microsoft has ever inflicted on people.
* with apologies to Charlie Brooker, hope he doesn't mind my "borrowing" that
I didn't downvote but I don't want contextual. I want stuff to stay in the same place, not disappear, reappear, or only appear in dropdowns under a vaguely related option which I won't find unless I'm clicking through each dropdown. If something doesn't work in the current context then disabling it will do fine, as the toolbars did.
I don't use Office enough to know the ribbon like the back of my hand, but I know it enough for it to annoy while I try and fail to find stuff. Yes, after 15 years.
I've given up trying to use the ribbon - I just type what I want in the help textbox jammed into the title bar (where it has no right to be, but that's another story). So much for progress.
There's dynamic 'contextual' interfaces and boring static interfaces.
Personally I like starting at a fixed point and knowing where I'm navigating to, consistently, regardless of what Clippy thinks I may be doing.
Same for these modern vehicles with Ipads for centre consoles. I like being able to adjust the heater without taking my eyes off the road, as the knob has one function and is always located in the same place.
Contextual can be good if you are genuinely lost (although your state off loss may be down to the contextualness), but for speed muscle memory FTW.
Maybe it's time to try Wine again.
For about 10 years I ran a linux box with different distros for fun (Mandrake, Sabayon, Pear, Mint Mate & Cinammon with a few others just on try-out) but went back to Microsoft when I wanted to run Adobe Lightroom and other related applications more than I wanted to play with computers. Wonder if the latest version of Wine would manage those applications OK now?
Ancient versions maybe, but a modern version of Gimp or Darktable will for sure work better than an ancient version of Photoshop or Lightroom.
People can argue about the merits of them vs modern versions of their Adobe equivalents, and the arguments for and against are generally valid.
It depends upon the technical description of "ancient", and what you are looking for. I'm still running CS6 at the office but I have Photoshop CC installed at home. The difference? Not much really, in the 90+% of functions that you use on a day-to-day basis. Yes, yes, CC now has these super-fancy, 'AI-enhanced' (and really cool) features that can seemingly work magic. I've used them, maybe, once.
If you're one of the people pushing that envelope of functionality - you know, the YT influencers and their followers with either a really high-stress / high energy creative job, or someone with just a lot of time on their hands for whom being a 'creator' is a hobby - then maybe a new version of GIMP can keep up.
But old versions of anything Adobe still has integration with other Adobe programs and that's way, way, way too powerful and important to ever think about giving up. No way am I losing Photoshop integration inside InDesign - not happening, I'm not going back to the PageMaker days.
Winetricks is good, and it was pretty much essential some years ago. With the advent of Bottles (https://usebottles.com/), using vanilla Wine on the CLI with Winetricks has become a thing of the past (at least for me). Sandboxing each windows app, with its own dependencies, and toggles for all the 'fun' options is far better than managing your wine prefixes in the CLI to avoid conflicts.
Perhaps the author could take a look, and add a boot-note to the article?
[Author here]
> Perhaps the author could take a look,
Well, I am listening. I don't often need Windows stuff any more, and while I have tried Winetricks and Bottles, I have not encountered a single app which needed them, so far.
Could you point me at any so that I can try?
Ideally, ones that are freeware or have demo versions or something, so I don't need to hoist the skull-and-crossbones just in order to test something.
There was a time when I used wine to run a few things in Linux, but a decade or more ago Crossover gave away a free licence for their software and I gave it a go. Suitably impressed, I've carried on using it and happily pay a small amount each year for updates. Crossover feed back into the Wine project anyway, so I consider my cash as directly supporting Wine.
If you're someone who can't be bothered to spend hours getting Wine going, then give Crossover a go. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
>Linux/Wine, maybe corporate can be weaned off the Windows teat.
From the Wine compatibility DB and the Top 10 applications listed, I think this is a low priority for Wine fans.
Digging to the DB and I note well-used versions of MS Office haven't been tested against recent versions - Project 2007 for example was last tested against Wine 1.3.22, although Visio 2007 was tested against 6.8. CrossOver isn't much better..
I would want to see the 'older' editions of major business applications being tested and listed as fully supported, before considering Wine as a key part of an enterprise desktop migration.
NB. I am assuming a first weaning step would be to replace Windows with Linux+Wine, with a subsequent step being the replacement of Office et al with Linux native applications.
It's quite likely that is a side effect of it working well.
If you install WINE and MS Office and it all works just fine, you probably won't bother looking at the compatibility list at all.
Hardly anyone ever reports when something works without any hassle. You get reports when it doesn't.
I had been using WINE to run a simple Windows based video editor. Unfortunately after 7.0 the application went from limping along but usable to DOA.
This forced me to bit the bullet and learn how to use kdenlive. It wasn't obvious but needs must.
Thanks to WINE I am now tee total and kdenlive turns out to be really neat
I'm actually motivated to try out Ubuntu + Wine after reading this.
I clicked several of the links in the article and the compatibility lists for Wine 8 are actually hilarious:
Platinum - Final Fantasy XI; World of Warcraft; Starcraft; Guild Wars; The Sims 3; Adobe Animate Flash CS6; Gothic; .NET 3.5; Diablo III; Silkroad Online
Gold - Adobe Photoshop CS6; Eve Online; The Witcher; Left 4 Dead; Guild Wars 2; Final Fantasy XIV; Command & Conquer 3; Sid Meier Civilization IV; Supreme Commander; Allods Online
Silver - Magic The Gathering; Logos Bible; Steam Official; Starcraft II; Roblox Player; Watchtower Library; Deus Ex; Warcraft III; MS Office 2019 Installer only; Half Life 2
My first criticism is these are largely older games, the MS office is for the "installer only" for some cryptic reason (the game itself doesn't run?), plus you've got Logos Bible vs Watchtower Library (e-book readers for religious magazines?) Guys: Adobe Animate Flash, platinum compatibility. Give me a break. Let's get serious.
The bit about the "outliner" category of software was extremely interesting. First of all, it's absolutely hilarious to read how incensed people are about the 2003 "ribbon menu" innovation of 20 years ago, gee guys, are you actually serious? I had to look up what the gripe is about, it's the words+icon horizontal menu bar for selecting commands. All I can say is that back in 2015 I got in touch with Microsoft "HUP" (home use program) and bought a permanent license to "MS Office Professional Plus 2016" for $11. If you want to grouch about aspects of a $11 software program, be my guest. That's about the same cost as a burger & piece of pie at the truck stop, I suppose one could get all fancy about such a thing, but seriously, guys: get a life.
Ok anyway, the bit about Outliners (outliners.com). Ok that web page dates back to 1999, and seems to describe a software category defined as an expanding and contracting hierarchical list.
"Outliners started out as simple hierarchy editors, used by lawyers, educators, students, engineers, executives; people who think -- to plan, organize and present their ideas.
Over time the products became more full-featured, especially on the Macintosh. Then the category died out, no one can explain fully why that happened, but in the early days of personal computers, outliners such as ThinkTank, Ready and MORE were popular programs.
Outliners are everywhere. Outlining as a user interface, survives to this day.
The expanding and collapsing file system viewer first appeared in Macintosh System 7, and now has become a common feature of all file system browsers."
(I have NEVER heard of programs such as ThinkTank, Ready, and MORE. And I grew up in the 1980s!)
While you've put it rather abrasively, you have pointed out a key point and criticism that can get fans of open source software rather worked up.
And that is one of image. The image that many, if not the vast majority, of open source projects present is at best disjointed and often rather visually unappealing. I mean, just look at the Wine website. Or how about LibreOffice?
There are of course exceptions, though most have significant capital actually behind them: Krita, Proton, Blender, etc.
And open source advocates may find that all rather superficial. But the truth is to many people that does matter. It does matter if your website looks like it's from the mid 2000s. It does matter that your UI does too. It does matter that the potential user is presented with a long list of steps to do something rather than a few simple clicks/taps. It does matter if someone has to hunt through a GitHub repository to find the installer.
> It does matter if your website looks like it's from the mid 2000s. It does matter that your UI does too.
The important bit about tech websites is that the content is maintained.
As for application UI - many current editions of major business applications do have a UI/UX that clearly dates from W2K/W2k3, in part because this UI the Windows furniture is unimportant, it is more important screen real estate is devoted to the application because that is what the user needs to interact with to do their job.
Personally, I find the wholly inconsistent presentation of something as simple as the vertical scroll bar across current versions of Windows/Windows applications irritating in the extreme.
The important bit about tech websites is that the content is maintained.
God yes. IBM's website looks modern I guess (huge white spaces, takes an age to load...) but no link older than a few years actually works so if you find somewhere else which links back to IBM's website where there's more info then it's a waste of time, because you're going to find nothing.
[Author here]
> And open source advocates may find that all rather superficial.
Well, TBH, yes I do.
I personally feel that functionality is so vastly more important than looks that if the functionality is good then the looks don't matter, whereas if the looks are great but the functionality is bad, I am not interested.
This is a common opinion among Unix/Linux folks, but it's not universal.
GNOME looks _great_. It has some of the best graphic design in the FOSS world.
For me, its functionality is abysmal and it's unusable.
KDE looks, IMHO, terrible. KDE 3 was bad, 4 was eye-burningly awful, and 5 is merely a bit better because it's flat.
However, it's also both cluttered with excess functionality and missing absolutely core things. So I don't use it either.
Xfce has all the core stuff and works, so for me, that's what I go for, and as a result, I don't care what it looks like.
I am not saying anyone is right or wrong here, just that opinions differ widely on this, and some of us find more of the stuff that looks modern and shiny to be so functionally impaired as to be no use at all.
Windows 11 is a good example of this for me. Modern Office probably is but I've not tried a current version since 2015. It was _horrendous_ then and all I have read suggests it has got a lot worse since.
Hi there. Author here. I found your comment very hard to follow indeed, I'm afraid, and I don't really know what you're saying.
Let's look:
> I'm actually motivated to try out Ubuntu + Wine after reading this.
Well, er, good? Glad to hear that.
> the compatibility lists for Wine 8 are actually hilarious
But you don't say what is hilarious about it, and I don't see anything even the tiniest bit amusing in there. Can you spell it out for us?
What I see is a long list of stuff I have mostly never seen or wanted to see in my life.
There are 30 apps in your list. Of this, I have seen precisely *two* ever.
I've played HL2. It's really hard, way too hard for me.
I have Steam and a Steam account. I basically never use it, but I do have it. I have about 5-6 games in my inventory, of which I've played one: Portal. It's brilliant. I've not tried P2 yet.
I don't like or need Office, so I've not tried Office 2019, but as I recall from older versions of Office on WINE, they do _say_ why the installer alone is rated: because the individual apps have standalone ratings.
Some bits work fine. The basic core Office apps are fine. Things like OneDrive are not standalone apps: they are extensions to the Windows OS and they don't work on other OSes because it makes no sense for them to work. For instance, a tool that adds a new drive letter to Windows won't work on an OS that does not have drive letters and never will. It's like complaining that you can't add an electric motor to a rake. It makes no sense.
If you want to access OneDrive from Linux, you can. There's the 3rd party `onedrive` client, or `rclone`. Running a Windows app won't help you.
Is that hilarious? I don't see it, and I am not being po-faced here. I just don't see the connection.
Are the games old or something? I don't know, I'm not a gamer. My newest console is a PS2. The last new game I bought was "Untitled Goose Game". Cuphead looks cool but too hard to waste the money. If games reviewers say it's hard, it's not worth me even trying.
> The bit about the "outliner" category of software was extremely interesting.
Er, good!
> the 2003 "ribbon menu" innovation of 20 years ago, gee guys, are you actually serious?
100% serious.
It was 2007, which is not 20Y ago. In fact 2003 is the last MS Office _without_ it so it's the opposite of your example. It was 16Y ago.
Yes, I still hate it. No, I don't, and won't, use it. I have alternatives, so I don't have to. Nothing is forcing me, so I don't. Is that funny? Why?
Outliners are basically dead and gone now. No, there are no direct modern descendants.
Saying that things have collapsible text in is not the same.
Let's say I wanted to edit hieroglyphics for some reason. Say I still wrote in them. I mean, I don't, but maybe someone somewhere does. If I said "Word doesn't support hieroglyphics and I need that," saying "durr, Word can show a picture of hieroglyphs, it's still there, of course it works" is not the same thing.
Editing text is not showing text. I can type
`cat readme.txt`
... and see a file but I can't change it. A viewer isn't an editor. An editor can be a viewer but doesn't need to be.
An outliner let me take in a .TXT file, edit it for two months over 200 changes a day, then save it back to a text file.
It's a kind of editing. It's not a view. It's not a viewer. It's a way of editing text. A very good one that's gone.
There are 2 kinds of outliner:
* intrinsic: one pane, one document, with structure
* extrinsic: two panes, tree on the left, text on the right: a tree-structured collection of lots of separate text files.
Oddly, there are several extrinsic outliners around today. Leo is an example:
https://leo-editor.github.io/leo-editor/
It's a perfectly nice app but it's a different sort of tool that's no use to me.
> I have NEVER heard of programs such as ThinkTank, Ready, and MORE
Not sure what to say to this. Your loss? Sorry about that?
They were Mac apps, mostly.
There were plenty of PC outliners, but they predate Windows. They were DOS-era tools.
The main PC ones were PC Outline and Grandview. The latter has been made freeware and it's out there.
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291/0/grandview-for-windows-v1
My earlier article on running DOS apps on 64-bit OSes will help you get it working, if you want. PC Outline was shareware so it never totally disappeared but as an early-1980s app it's pretty horrible to use by modern standards.
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/0/pc-outline
Wording such as "WINE has matured like a fine Wine" is useless when we are talking about a compatibility layer, a category of software for which objective criteria of maturity exist. For example, how much of the current win32/win64 API has WINE implemented so far? That's what matters. Trying random software in the hope you won't hit an unimplemented part of the API is not an objective evaluation method.
And yes, I am aware that, even if you have 100% of the API implemented, there are still edge cases and creative uses of the API that a compatibility layer has to contend with, but having 100% coverage is the minimum requirement for calling a compatibility layer mature.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
