This release represents over a year of development effort and around
6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications and games. See the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.
As awesome of a project Wine is, I wonder how many people actually use it on a daily basis. Maybe I’m wildly off base here (honestly, I probably am), but it seems like if you’re running Linux, there’s really nothing Windows applications offer that Linux can’t.
I use Wine mainly for Mixcraft, which I use frequently when I’m composing. It doesn’t work perfectly, but certainly well enough for transcribing my piano improvs, and it’s much better than having to reboot into Windows. I used to use Finale 2012 in Wine a lot, but I have been preferring MuseScore lately for my notation needs, and it runs natively in Linux. I also use the occasional Windows tool in Wine, but the bulk of my work is done using native Linux programs.
I think a lot of musicians would be interested in pro audio tools that are not available on Linux. Especially apps that are dedicated synth editors, like Total Librarian for the Yamaha Motif.
Go old school and get an Atari ST with Cubase?
Actually I’ve seen quite a few music composing bits of software in Linux, I’m just not sure how good they are.
I used it to run Diablo 3 for quite a while, until Blizzard added the all-in-one Blizzard launcher, and I couldn’t get the launcher to run with the same Bumblebee settings as the game itself.
The two things I’d love to try to use it for are World of Warcraft and iTunes (I still have an iPhone). iTunes isnt supported and WoW supposedly is but I’ve never gotten it to work
.
Back in the original release and BC days I played WoW almost exclusively on Linux. Back then it was “unofficially supported”, as in there was a WoW dev in the community forums who would give out info on tweaking Wine and your Linux installation to be able to play the game properly. It was never 100% perfect but it was playable, and often better framerates than Windows on the same hardware. If I recall correctly, my system at the time was an AMD Athlon X2 with a Nvidia 6600GT card.
I stopped playing around 2007 though, so that anecdotal info is likely irrelevant today.
I’ve never had a problem running WoW in WINE, Fedora actually has a package Wine-WoW that helps it run.
A lot of Wine developers play WoW, or at least they did before.
Since there is an official version of the WoW client for macOS, one would think it wouldn’t be overly hard for Blizzard to maintain an official Linux version, as well. Most, if not all, of the POSIX plumbing is already there. I haven’t run the Windows client under WINE in ages, but I remember it running pretty decently.
I use it to run Total Commander and Notepad++.
Linux has a lot of alternatives to both of them, but I still prefer those Windows based tools.
Have you tried Geany as a replacement for notepad++? With a few plugins installed, there’s nothing I miss from Notepad++. I even use Geany on Windows too, now.
Or sublime text
I use Wine for AutoCAD R14 (yep, an oldie – I have yet to become comfortable with LibreCAD) and for Steam (looking at switching to the Linux client, but it won’t happen yet).
Virtually all specialist scientific, engineering, business and legal software is Windows only (or sometimes ported to Mac). There is no Office for Linux, no AutoCad for Linux, no professional quality tax packages, no professional medical practice management software etc etc.
Edited 2017-01-26 02:39 UTC
unclefester,
I agree with that, most commercial applications don’t come with any linux support, unfortunately. Sometimes even when there is a viable linux alternative, the proprietary windows software (patient management, CRM, ticket management, VPN, etc) used by clients forces me to also have windows.
As for Office apps, I’ve made a complete transition to use libreoffice instead of ms-office, sometimes there are conversion issues, but generally it’s good enough for my purposes.
Web based applications might be a viable way for businesses to escape the grasp of windows, but personally I still prefer being in control of data with local applications.
For electronic design (PCBs, logic simulation, ASIC and FPGA synthesis…) many commercial software have a Linux version.
I would add that most colleges, universities, and medium to large corporations are essentially Windows based for their applications – whether developed internally or purchased. Also, many office support programs (e.g. data entry for time-sheets and expense accounts, training) are Java programs designed especially for the Microsoft Windows/Internet Explorer environment.
This forces independent contractors to follow suite so that their results (documents, spreadsheets, etc.) are compatible with what their clients use.
With Wine, an independent contractor could essentially be immersed in Linux except when needed because the client uses a Windows-only program or that there are compatibility issues.
There’s Softmaker Office: http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux
But I’ve found it’s not quite as compatible with MS stuff as other non-MS alternatives (but they’re on Windows, of course)
Can you share your experiences? As an owner of a copy of SM Office 2016, I find it the most MS-compatible office suite, except the macro stuff. (I mostly use TextMaker.) But of course, there are always usage specifics and corner cases.
The issues I’ve noticed are generally with tables; they don’t always convert that well.
I do have to say, though, that in my case the tables in question are usually created by a third party, so I can’t comment on how well they were originally constructed.
OK, I don’t know where you’re getting your info on scientific software specifically, but there’s quite a lot of it that’s Linux only. Especially bioinformatics and chemistry related stuff. Much of the ‘official’ hardware interface tools might be Windows only (although quite often a lot of the same things can be done with little effort from Linux), but there is very little in terms of actual computational software other than Matlab (which has 2 alternatives on Linux (Octave and FreeMat)) that is Windows exclusive. Commercial software maybe, but very little in terms of widely used scientific software is actually comercial beyond hardware interface tools.
ahferroin7,
That seems plausible, I think a big factor is that the scientific community has access to the source code, and source code opens up opportunities for alternatives. Proprietary code often locks us in to windows. It’s a positive feedback loop, commercial developers will target the windows desktop because it has the market share rather than because of any intrinsic qualities.
For server side web development it’s actually the other way around and windows web servers are the outliers. The growth of linux on servers is so significant that microsoft has had to deviate from it’s own monopoly tactics to support the linux server market:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on…
Edited 2017-01-26 15:09 UTC
Linux isn’t particularly special here, UNIX-like systems have always dominated the scientific computing scene, regardless of whether or not the source is freely available. VMS and Multics are the only two true operating systems that have even come close over the year). There are a bunch of factors involved, but the three biggest are that UNIX has traditionally supported much larger systems than alternatives (with the exception of VMS and Multics), is more efficient than many alternatives (both a cause and side effect of the popularity for scientific usage), and is actually (usually) easier to program for for new programmers.
The whole open-source factor is, however, a large part of why Linux has risen to the forefront among UNIX derivatives, but it’s again not the only factor. Portability and versatility have had just as much impact on it’s popularity, and are why it’s generally won out over BSD (people talk about having to hunt to find hardware that works with Linux, but it’s generally much worse with BSD).
Now, as far as server systems, that’s insanely easy to explain, better performance, simpler management, and an easier to secure system make Linux more cost effective. BSD is still popular in that market for the same reasons (and there are actually more BSD systems in the core infrastructure of the internet than Linux systems, because BSD is still king when it comes to routing and filtering network traffic), but is perceived as outdated by a lot of younger people, and has no widely publicized commercial support options (outside of a couple of specific cases like pfSense and FreeNAS).
Scilab is more of an alternative than Octave, even if it’s less compatible with MATLAB.
Matlab actually has a native Linux version..
Also, as far as patient management systems, I know at least of a project for dental offices, and I’m pretty sure there is just one for medical offices too.
http://www.softwareadvice.com/dental/ shows the majority of them run on Linux.
What it comes down to is that if you’re willing to search long enough, you can most likely find a substitute for any software.
leech,
Is it just me, or does it seem very amusing to have a DMD speaking about Postgres?
Open Dental is another example where linux support only refers to the database/file server rather than client. For some reason I’m absolutely fascinated with these dentists discussing linux and database issues like mysqlhotcopy.
http://opendentalsoft.com/forum/search.php?keywords=linux
It’s probably indicative of my own biases, but dentists who have sql database experience seems worlds apart from the practitioners I know. Maybe they started with a tech background and then went to dental school for the job prospects? Either way, now I’m interested in finding a dentist who knows linux & sql that I can relate to
Edited 2017-01-26 23:22 UTC
Computational and mathematical sciences are a microscopic sliver of the science community. The vast majority of scientists work in the medical and life sciences. Many need no more computational power than a basic laptop with MS Office.
For basic field work or office management maybe, for actual serious research, there’s generally a pretty significant need even in medical and life sciences for a whole lot of number crunching during at least part of the research process. Pretty much anything involving genetics or proteomics (which are where a lot of ongoing life sciences research is happening) ends up using a huge amount of computing power, and Windows is rarely involved in such usage beyond job submission or as a distributed computing node.
In reality, almost every branch of science uses some form of high-performance computing these days, even if it’s just for data correlation or visualization. Even cases most people wouldn’t normally think of like archeology and sociology have practical uses for computing beyond just taking notes. There used to be a HPC edition of Windows Server. The last release was with XP and Server 2003, because Microsoft finally realized that they were just wasting resources trying to get people to use their software. They lost in that market for the same reason they lost in every other market they’ve had to pull out of, they were too late to the party and couldn’t compete in terms of what people actually cared about.
I use Wine to run OpenMPT and Xara3D3.
There aren’t any native Linux alternatives for those two that come even close.
https://openmpt.org/
http://www.xara.com/us/products/xara3d/
Looks like Xara Xtreme was ported over to Linux, wonder why they haven’t ported Xara3D.
Yes, a cut-down version of Xara Xtreme (Xara Xtreme XL) was ported to Linux as an open source project with GPL but development on it stalled a few years ago. A key issue was that Xara’s speed came from the Cdraw library and this wasn’t opensourced – a closed binary was released with permission to be distributed freely. It was adapted to use the Cairo engine shortly before the project ground to a halt.
Though I also use OpenMPT to play Impulse Tracker songs, I prefer Renoise that is native on Linux, Mac and Windows.
ebasconp,
I used Impulse Tracker myself, and had composed some music using it’s midi features as well. I haven’t found any modern software that can play impulse tracker’s midi format though. Even windows stopped supporting midi playback natively. Fortunately impulse tracker still works under dosbox, but the midi emulation is much worse than the music I originally composed which I have no way to listen to anymore. I regret not making an mp3 copy back then.
With Windows 10 gradually irritating me more and more, I’ve worked out my evacuation strategy, and the suite of programs needed for that. Office 2010 will be the core of that for at least a couple of years. The others are EssentialPIM, Password Safe (the Linux port is still in beta and I haven’t tried it yet), Exact Audio Copy, IsoBuster. Using PlayOnLinux as a front-end to Wine, they all install and run, although I haven’t tested enough to say how well they run.
The more random Windows programs Wine can run acceptably well, the more likely I am to recommend friends and family switch to Linux.
i’m still using it for sketchup… might be that i’m too lazy to find a proper alternative but i have yet to stumble on something that intuitive…
Also my garmin maps are only accessible through the crappy garmin client of which i can’t find an alternative either
I have used Wine for several years specifically for running older Windows games. There is a lot of old games I still like to play at times which do not work on Windows 7 and the odd one that won’t even run on XP! They do work fine in Linux running under Wine though. I find it brilliant for this task and hopefully it will long continue.
Edited 2017-01-26 06:53 UTC
I use Wine for a couple of hardware-specific tools I haven’t had time to reverse engineer (Yamaha MusicSoft downloader and the ROM loader for the GBA Flashcart I used to dump my GBA BIOS) plus a whole bunch of games that haven’t received DRM-free Linux releases on GOG or Humble. (Mostly classics off GOG and Adobe AIR indie, but also things like TES4: Oblivion and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams.)
(I use PlayOnLinux’s “install a non-listed program” mode as a WINEPREFIX manager and, at the moment, I’ve got about 30 games installed.)
One of them (the first Star Trek Armada) only runs in Wine because my 133MHz Win98 retro-PC is too slow and the installer freezes on my WinXP retro-PC.
I am not using it on daily basis but it helped me a lot to transition from Windows to other OSes (Linux, BSD, Mac OS X) in the end. Still there are always some games you want to play (old ones), some weird, specific domain application to run, etc. It saves you from rebooting, keeping Windows VM or looking for other solutions. Plus windows app compatibility makes them last much longer than let’s say mac os x alternatives (I have few games which were running on old mac versions but not anymore on current one, on the other hand wine runs windows versions of them perfectly to date).
I use Wine quite often to run games. In fact, a number of games run better for me on Wine than Windows 10 (notably Star Wars: Empire at War, and Oblivion).
I’ve also used it in the past to test cross-compiled programs, and it is sometimes useful for running installers for older games I want to play on 64-bit Windows which have a 32-bit executable but only have 16-bit installers.
I use Wine on a daily basis 🙂
Here’s a list of applications which Linux solely lacks and some of them I use daily:
* Irfan View – no other Linux image viewer matches its speed and features
* Mp3tag
* Far File Manager (Midnight Commander is a joke)
* NotePad++
* WinSCP
* WinAMP/foobar2000
And others which are relevant for my workflow.
WinSCP?
Did Wine finally achieve the “WinXP 32-bit” goal that is supposed to be its first goal? No? Did it even reach 100% completeness on Direct 3D 9? No? Then what’s the point of having a 2.0 or 1.0 version?
There is currently no Windows version (barring truly ancient ones, and I am not sure about those either) that Wine can claim to offer compatibility for. So, what’s the purpose of 1.0? And 2.0? But hey, 2.0 is cool, let’s have a 2.0 version. I mean, Canonical even embeds release dates in their version, it’s not like version numbers are supposed to represent anything, like the progress of a project and when it has achieved it’s goals to a satisfactory degree.
Edited 2017-01-26 12:36 UTC
I don’t understand your sarcasm and critics.
Windows is a closed source OS with thousands of undocumented quirks and it’s not even theoretically possible to emulate Win32 APIs unless someone is looking at Windows’ sources. Maybe Wine will reach parity with Windows 95 once its sources are released but I don’t believe Microsoft will ever do that before they go bankrupt.
Meanwhile a lot of games written before and during the Windows XP lifespan work better in Wine than in Windows 10 even though Wine doesn’t fully support D3D 9.0c features: https://www.winehq.org/winapi_stats
Again, nobody said about an 100% emulation of Windows XP and its bugs, just a full implementation of the Win32 API, at least the part relevant to WinXP 32bit
But let’s have a several non-0.x versions so that we get to congratulate one another, and if some people think the software actually does what it promises to do (implementation of the WinXP 32-bit at least) in a complete manner and lose their time with it, sucks for them.
Edited 2017-01-26 17:05 UTC
What has been your level of success using Wine?
Is this coming from experience of recent versions?
I’ve been using Wine since 1998 and I have helped resolve numerous bugs in it (not as a developer, as an end user who files bug reports). Also I’m a maintainer of several applications in AppDB.
I cannot measure my level of success, because speaking frankly I don’t understand what you mean, but most Windows applications which I need run just fine under Wine albeit not without small glitches, quirks and occasional crashes.
Edit: Oops, you asked a different person but I will reply anyways 😉
Edited 2017-01-26 20:11 UTC
Yeah I have been a maintainer of couple of applications in AppDB in the past too.
My experience has been that Wine for older games (via Steam and GOG) and applications such as Foobar2000 has been a success.
I was wondering why kurkosdr seems to be bitter about Wine and attempting find out whether he has used it and dislikes it, or whether he just does not like the idea of Wine regardless of how well it works (or not).
Edited 2017-01-26 22:43 UTC
I think he’s just trolling.
Either you’re an idiot or pretend to be the one.
You cannot claim compatibility with something based on 100% “correct” implementation of its interfaces while the said interfaces often do not conform to the publicly available documentation and the said interfaces have quirks for certain applications which expect your interfaces to fail in a certain way. You can easily find those special quirks in Windows registry and also in the WinSxS directory where certain DLLs have several slightly different versions for different applications. If you expect Wine to be able to run successfully most applications written for Windows then the said quirks/workarounds/etc. must be implemented in Wine as well by a person who somehow perfectly knows about these intricacies and by now this group of persons reside in Redmond behind the strictly closed doors.
Also you failed at Wine history. 100% Windows XP compatibility has never been claimed. As far as I remember it was Windows 95 or even Windows 3.1 first.
So what you’re asking is absolutely impossible, yet you’re reviling Wine developers for choosing quite a sane versioning scheme which at least coincides with user visible changes unlike for instance Firefox/Chrome which increase their major version numbers every 2-3 months despite anything that might concern their users.
I need Wine to run Watchtower Library.
Were that really true, desktop Linux would have more than the .01% of the marketshare it has now. People use certain applications for good reasons, and it’s not always just because they’ve used it before.
Well, the market share is around 2.5% these days. Approx. 1/3 of the macOS market share. Counting desktops only.
I use Wine to run StereoPhotoMaker. (I actually bundled it in WineBottler, and run it on Mac OS.)
I suspect there are many niche/specialist applications like this that have no comparable version across platforms. A single developer who creates a passion project, but who is only conversant in developing for one platform. That’s the case for StereoPhotoMaker. I bet there are even more examples on the Linux and Mac side, but sadly there is no Wine-equivalent to run those specialist apps on Windows…
This one website communicates with me through onsite pdfs(rather than send emails) and does some sort of check that prevents both non-window browsers and those not setup to display in-line pdfs from entering that section.
I generally only buy games on steam that run on linux but frequently find both performance and stability problems that are resolved in wine.
I use wine to run XMPlay, so I can play all my old computer music when in the mood.
I use it regularly with dictionary programs that I use a lot when translating. The equivalent programs are just not as user friendly in my experience.
I’ll have to try to see if they’ve fixed the issue with installing vncenter through Wine. It’s one of the very last utilities that I actually need Windows for.
The one reason why I have to use Wine from time to time is because with complex Word importing to and exporting from LibreOffice messes things up, which means that collaborative editing with colleagues using MS Office doesn’t work. Of course, things would be easier if they all switched to Libreoffice, but this won’t happen until it finally closes OpenOffice bug 9661 (“Use margins to track changes) Unbelievably, the bug report has been around since 2002 [sic!], so a full 15 years, but they have never even began fixing it, and this deters most of my friends from using it. see https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=9661 and https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34355
Edited 2017-01-28 22:30 UTC