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glossyscr

Out of curiosity: Is there any Windows killer app in 2016 I need WINE for?

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As a gamer, most of the tools for aiding with GMing role playing games are windows only.

Some examples:

Shadowrun 3rd edition has an excellent free-as-in-beer character management tool that runs fine under wine.

Essentially all of the mapping software; even open-source AutoREALM is windows only (though there is a port to wx in progress). I use the profantasy (proprietary) tools which mostly work under wine, though I had to bypass the copy-protection to get it to work despite being a paying customer :(

With SaaS beoming more popular, there are now webapps that cover some of the features above, though to varying degrees of polish.

Photoshop. The only reason i am still running OSX is Photoshop.

and Steam, but that also might be game dependant i guess

If you aren't doing painting you should look into Nuke.

Do you mind Nuke costs 5x more than Photoshop? Otherwise completely agree.

I found Pixelmator to be a great alternative, at least for for my non-professional use, on OS X. It's a lot cheaper and you only pay once.

I think he wants to get away from OS X and move to Linux

True. Oh well, maybe another reader will find that information useful

How's the performance, compared to native installation ?

You don't need Wine for that on OS X though

I think that's what he was saying.

For my basic needs, gimp and krita have been enough

If you make music and use a DAW, then Reaper is a killer app. To run on Linux it's recommended to use WINE. It's speculation, but I'm pretty sure they'd release a native-Linux version if it didn't work so perfectly well with WINE.

I've been using Bitwig Studio on Linux since it came out in 2014 and enjoying it immensely.

Reaper is praised by a lot, that's true.

But I wouldn't call it a killer app when linux has great native DAW like ardour (libre), LMMS (libre), Non (libre), Renoise (proprietary) or Bitwig (proprietary) and probably others.

I do all of my app development in Borland Delphi 2.0.

No, just kidding. I just sometimes fantasize about being able to.

All of my machines run Debian or OpenBSD but two applications I run through wine are "Gameboy Tile Designer" and "Gameboy Map Builder"[0]. They used to develop graphic resources for gameboy development and despite not being developed for 15+ years are still very useful.

And they're both written in Delphi. He's released the sources but that doesn't help get native binaries in this case, so wine it is.

[0]http://www.devrs.com/gb/hmgd/intro.html

Should be noted that wine does not run on OpenBSD, just to prevent people making an incorrect assumption about your post.

http://www.getlazarus.org/

They just had a release recently actually (which made it to HN front page!).

It's basically cross-platform open-source Delphi (FreePascal, technically). As someone who works in Embarcadero Delphi and C++Builder for a living, it's quite nice. My dream rapid GUI development environment would be something like it but with D.

Also, having a Windows VM provides (usually) a much better experience (but yeah, you need the Windows license).

I'd say games, which benefit from the shorter abstraction and hardware acceleration

Office, though it doesn't work with WINE. Other than that not for me. Games for some people I think.

For a long time I would have agreed--Office is Windows' killer app since the Windows version is way better than the other OS versions.

But looking deeper it's getting harder and harder to justify Office:

For presentations I prefer Keynote. It's not perfect but still better. Spreadsheet I use Google Sheets, inferior to Excel but good enough and live collaborating is unbeaten and this is my number one requirement.

Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph numbering and misses a review mode which is super important when negotiating contracts.

So, Word is Office's last lock-in.

Sometime you just have to collaborate with people that live inside the Microsoft bubble... And Excel is still a pretty hard lock-in for "power users".

The problem is not the lack of alternatives for personal use (I use LaTeX as a Word alternative), it's collaboration. If you are required to produce Word documents, PowerPoint presentantions, etc., using certain corporate templates, or as part of a standardized workflow, then you really need windows.

Also there are other, more specialized programs that require Windows such as SolidWorks, etc.

I am using SoftMaker Office 2016, (http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux) on my Linux box and it works great for collaborating on MS Office documents - preserves formatting and everything else without a problem.

LibreOffice is pretty good these days. Like Google Docs, it's not a drop-in replacement for Office, but good enough for many uses.

LibreOffice is good enough for typing up a few simple paragraphs and occasionally tweaking the font.

Anything even slightly complicated, though, will look like a modern webpage rendered in IE6. This is merely annoying with Word documents, but downright catastrophic with PowerPoint slides. I don't care how many obscure features it can emulate if it can't even render line spacing properly.

Except for the Find feature that never works right. Cmd-F and try to paste into that box, for example. I use LibreOffice daily but that one is annoying. It crashes once a week too. I think LibreOffice is close, but I don't think most people are going to give up Excel for almost as good as Excel.

Sounds like you're referring to this bug, which is finally seeing some attention

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853

LO should basically never crash, ever - the stability work is stupendous. If it does, there's something deeply wrong with the system.

If the crashes are reproducible, do be sure to file a bug.

LibreOffice Impress is horrifically bad. The Undo function is unreliable which is an enormous data-destroying pain in the ass when editing a presentation. The tools for editing text and vector graphics are also inconsistent and buggy.

I do all my presentations with Slidy. I can't think of a better "tool". It also make it so easy to put your presentations online:

https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/

No offense but "ew". The demo page is hideous and I don't see how you can easily do graphics with that. Maybe it's fine for making slides for people to look at later, but for actual presentations slides, that looks like a recipe for PowerPoint hell.

I guess if you use impress/PowerPoint to do you graph, which I don't.

> Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph

Have you tried LibreOffice? In terms of both stability and MSO interoperability has greatly improved over the OpenOffice days. It has every feature that you should expect a word processor to have.

Check out SoftMaker Office 2016. Its word processor TextMaker is superiour to Word regarding features (it includes many that Word doesn't, e.g. address database. epub export etc.)., speed and reliability (never had a crash or screwed formatting which I often had with Word). The spreadsheet and presentation apps are also excellent, and all programs are highly compatible with Microsoft Office formats.

I'm happily running Office 2007 with PlayOnLinux.

Office pretty much doesn't work on the Mac either...

I kid but the latest version of Office is really crashy on OS X, specifically Excel.

I use MS Word exclusively on Mac OS X, and I have to say that it works just fine. It doesn't have all features of the Windows version, but for normal usage I don't see any problem.

> Office, though it doesn't work with WINE.

That's news to me as I happen to run office through wine :)

You need to use office 2010 32bit (newer doesn't work) with a 32bit winearch, but apart from that it installs fine using the standard MS installer, no tweaks or hacks, and integrates perfectly into the x desktop with file associations and launcher controls and everything.

Below is my setup: https://github.com/josteink/machine-build/blob/master/profil...

I use WINE on a daily basis for 1Password. The browser integration even works with the native Linux version of Chrome, which is a much better user experience than copypasting passwords from the html/js based 1PasswordAnywhere.

foobar2000 is still by far the best music player.

Noooo Winamp!

xmms! /dev/dsp for life!

There was a really good point with XMMS when Winamp music vis's worked OK, and life was good.

AFAIK wine is still needed for a bunch of old app:

I have installed ubuntu on the computer of my old parents. Wine was mandatory to use powerpoint viewer.

Personally, I need the windows version of firefox to watch catchup TV (DRM protected using flash).

Doesn't Firefox support drm across the board now? Chrome as well? If the site complains you can try changing the user agent string to fool it into thinking that you're running on Windows.

Firefox only supports DRM on Windows. I hadn't thought to use WINE for a Windows install of Firefox on Linux. Chrome's DRM support is cross-platform, but only in Google Chrome, not Chromium, which can complicate the installation depending on your platform/OS.

Have you tried the hal daemon? I'm running Firefox on Linux and after setting it up, DRM content with Flash works.

I hadn't seen that before. Looks like it covers the Flash side only based on some quick reading and your comment.

Any word on e.g. Netflix support for Firefox on Linux/BSD? Google Chrome bundles the DRM components with the browser, so as long as you can consume the .deb or .rpm package you're good.

Firefox recently introduced HTML5 DRM support[0] but it's only on Windows. I know they're looking to support other operating systems, but haven't heard anything.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/17/firefox-users-can-n...

Ah I see. I guess there's no support for HTML5 DRM yet.

Depends on what you do - lately I've been mostly installing it to people's computers to run certain specialized windows-only software, things like Origin for physicists, project management software, internal company software that kind of thing. Running these things is still usually was less hassle than having to maintain a fully blown VM with all the file and clipboard sharing issues that causes to less techy people.

If all you do is browse web and use a few portable apps you're fine.

Kindle for PC, to funnel ebooks through to calibre (http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/). Even though I'm sceptical of the monopoly-like situation, Amazon still often has the widest range and lowest prices on ebooks.

Toad for MySql (it's db data compare is unrivalled)...but it doesn't work on WINE.

Ableton Live

Killer Business use of Wine: when you have a linux farm, and you really need that one Windows accounting/enterprise/billing app, and you don't want to manage/license a Windows Server.

Cross-browser testing of your web code (Explorer)

=> Browserstack

That is a web service, and it costs at least $29 per month.

I use ievms for this: http://xdissent.github.io/ievms/

It automates installing/snapshotting Microsoft's virtualmachine images for various windows/ie combinations using VirtualBox. Works well on Linux and OSX.

In my case: Evernote, Office and SQLyog. Also the Adobe Suite, but if find that to be unusable under wine so I go for a VirtualBox.

Games.

Much less so now than in the past now with Valve/Steam's fairly good support for Linux/SteamOS.

Blizzard games don't run on Linux yet. :/

Actually they run very well in WINE.

Well yes. The thread was about what Windows-only programs we use in Wine. Blizzard games are examples of such, a counterpoint to Valve games which run natively. I do not understand your comment.

I use wine to run windows games on windows...

Microsoft broke the Dx8 and below emulation in windows 8, some games just run slow, but some are unplayable ( Arcanum for example render most of the sprites and map solid black without Wine )

Since I am using Wine more and more to game, and new releases work on Linux natively, I am thinking of experimenting not installing Windows at all on my next PC

EDIT: To use Wine on Windows you just paste wine DLLs on the game folder.

Not all versions of Wine work with all games, you might need to try several, currently the site with the DLLs is this one:

http://adolfintel.com/index.php?p=wined3d/index.frag

How do you do this? Assassin's Creed I and II are very unstable on Windows 10 - this might be a solution. Hell, even Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory runs better under Wine than it does under Windows 10.

which wine do you use to play arcanum? I tried wine and it was so slow as to be completely unusable, so I got a virtualbox running windows 10, which works fine.

Many Valve/Steam games use Wine libraries to do their thing on Linux/SteamOS ports, so Wine is probably more important and more used now than ever before. The fact that they work so well that most folks don't even realize there's (some of) Wine behind the scenes is testament to how far it has come.

Only if you want specific titles, there are a lot of Linux games on Steam these days (117 out of 231 of my games work on Linux).

There are a lot, but there still aren’t many big name titles. The ones that have been ported often have a lot of issues too (see BioShock, the Witcher). Also if the game is even slightly old, chances are it works great in WINE and there’s no hope of a Linux port.

Witcher 2 runs perfectly now, and not sure what issues you are referring to for Bioshock Infinite. It was a good port.

Of _course_ I want specific titles.

Darkest Dungeon!

Skype windows version (Linux version does not have video calls).

That's not true, Skype 4.3.0.37 does have video calls.

Actually, it had video calls for ages.

Poor phrasing. I tried to mean that at least the version I am currently running does indeed have video calls.

You don't need Skype ever. Just use https://meet.jit.si

Umm, what? Been making video calls on Skype Linux version for years...

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