Patches to make WINE work on Wayland display server protocol are being merged

With WINE 8 out, the team is merging in the code changes to add support for the Wayland display server protocol. Although the process began last Friday, the introductory notes on the merge do say: "This is the first of (many) parts in the upstreaming of the Wayland driver for Wine." WINE 8.0 came out just a month earlier so …

[TVU]

I think I would still regard Wayland as a work in progress, e.g. there can still be issues when working with multiple monitors although others have a more frank assessment:

"It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house".

[Scotthva5]

I've found the lighting of ritual candles helps, as does a bit of interpretive dance. Chanting is optional.

[Horridbloke]

Sounds like this generation's SCSI.

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for browser independence

"Many apps embed Chrome "

[42656e4d203239]

Re: So much for browser independence

well there are only a few browser engines out there, so browser independance is largely a myth anyway...

Any browser on Apple is in fact a a skin for Webkit

Outside the walled garden

Any Chromium allike browser uses Blink

Any Firefox alike browser uses Gecko.

Any Goanna based browser is using a Gecko fork.

IE based browsers used Trident - but that is largely deprecated now (excpet for windows internal stuff where hard links to IE/Trident still exist)

An honourable mention goes to Flow... I don't know if there any browsers out there using it though.

[Liam Proven]

Re: So much for browser independence

[Author here]

> Any browser on Apple is in fact a a skin for Webkit

Only on iOS (including iPad OS). This is _not_ true on Apple's main and arguably flagship OS, the desktop macOS. In fact I don't use Safari or anything Safari-based on my Macs: I use only Waterfox, Firefox and Chrome.

You need to be more careful. Conflating Apple with iDevices leads you astray.

[that one in the corner]

Re: So much for browser independence

Not clear what do you mean by "browser independence".

Do you mean "by embedding Chrome, these apps are independent of whichever is your favourite browser, so no matter which browser you have installed to surf the web, even if that is Lynx, these apps will still keep on working 100% the way they are meant to, because they have their own embedded browser subsystem on which to run their Javascript code in a totally known environment"?

No, that can't be right, as you appear to be implying that somehow these apps, by being all self-reliant, are a bad thing.

Sorry, I'm lost - can you clarify your argument?

[Mockup1974]

Microsoft Office 2021/365 support WHEN?

[ThatOne]

Oh yes, one day you'll be able to run Wine in an emulated Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux running on Wine running on an emulated Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux running on Wine (and so on)

[swm]

Many years ago we had a debugger on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System that ran a program in a mode where all calls to the executive (including breakpoints) were handled by the debugger. T test this we ran a debugger under a debugger under a debugger etc. and the darn thing worked!

[Someone Else]

"Damn this traffic jam!"

_{Ob. James Taylor ref.}

[42656e4d203239]

>Microsoft Office 2021/365 support WHEN?

As a pure guess - Probably when Microsoft stop using undocumented APIs, or hacks to get around Windows limitations, that can't be reliably emulated under Linux...

[Michael Strorm]

Office ain't done 'til WINE won't run

> Probably when Microsoft stop using undocumented APIs

That is to say, when pigs fly?

[david 12]

Microsoft stop using undocumented APIs, or hacks

That was the subject of a court case, which is probably why you have heard of and mis-remembered it.

As the result of the court case, MS published a complete list of all the undocumented APIs used by Office. They are still being updated (there are still new applications and components) You can download the documents now (and for other MS applications), if you can be bothered to look: it's mostly pages and pages of boring legacy technical debt, where for clearly historical reasons Office wound up using some API that was latter published in a better form, or left unpublished because there was a better alternative. Certainly I never found anything actually interesting, but in the end, for a totally different reason, people building WINE or DOSbox or whatever would have used it.

There is still a lot of unpublished or poorly documented or trade-secret documented internal OS API, used for drivers or other windows components. Not Office.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> Microsoft Office 2021/365 support WHEN?

In WINE, you mean?

I don't use the modern versions, but AIUI the core apps work fine.

Stuff that manipulates the Windows OS and extends it is never going to work right if Windows isn't there. OneDrive and Sharepoint extend Windows' network sharing functions. Linux doesn't have Windows' network stack, it has its own. They are not going to work and can't; it's hard to even define what it would mean for Windows OneDrive to "work" on Linux.

But Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even, up to a point, Outlook work, I think.

Certainly older versions do. I routinely use Word 97 and Word 2003 on WINE. I don't want any other bits of MS Office myself. The PowerPoint and Excel viewers from Office late-2000-and-something work fine, are free downloads, and they are my personal baseline compatibility test.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Stuff that manipulates the Windows OS and extends it is never going to work right if Windows isn't there.

Due, presumably, to the fact that WINE is a compatibility layer for running Windows software under Linux as opposed to an emulator or a virtual (Windows) machine.

(Hence the name, "WINE Is Not an Emulator").