Thread: Unix Popularity
View Single Post
Old 6th July 2008
ninjatux's Avatar
ninjatux ninjatux is offline
Real Name: Baqir Majlisi
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Antarctica
Posts: 293
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
Ugh. I principle I agree, but in practice that is a painful road. I have found wine to be the most maddening program to use in all of OSS. Applications work one day, and not the next when the program is "improved." Many years ago I had Word 2K and Acrobat 4 running under Wine. Neither do any more. IE is unstable for me, but it is useful once in a while.

Codeweavers' support will help with some mainstream applications, and certainly I will welcome what they put out when they release Crossover on BSD.

For many of the things I do a virtual machine just works better. Of course I only do the simple things there, and no games, AutoCAD or things like that. Those are just done better on a Win box.
I personally don't like to reboot, so I welcome additions to the virtual machine software such as accelerated graphics. At the moment, unity/coherency modes in VMWare, VirtualBox, and Parallels actually offer a decently integrated environment for running Windows in virtual machines without the usual constraints.

In principle, WINE is great, and I completely agree with you, but like I said that Codeweavers shouldn't really concentrate on providing a souped-up version of WINE. They should develop versions of WINE that are compatible with only a single application or a handful of similar applications, then sell these wrappers of sorts. I'd imagine that some times certain applications in WINE break because of fixes applied for other applications. Either that, or Codeweavers should start marketing WINE as a starting point for companies to port their applications, maybe make some sort of porting kit as TransGaming did with Cedega for Mac.
__________________
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE)
Reply With Quote