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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

WINE is so great.

I wish there were a more user-friendly way for people to use it, without the command-line and winetricks. I use wine on macOS, but I usually hesitate before diving in, because I know it inevitably involves some gymnastics. Even with Wineskin Winery (which is no longer maintained?).

Will WINE ever be at a point where it would be stable enough to make the case for non-technical users? Another comment joked about public offices -- would it be absurd to think offices could run linux instead of windows, saving licensing costs, using WINE where legacy software is necessary?

I would have started using WINE even earlier if the documentation were more approachable. I think they've improved over the last few years, though the site still looks like an antique forum system rather than cutting-edge tech + design, like you would see from a startup's website.

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Valve has been doing a lot of work here lately, they've essentially made Wine into a first party citizen of Steam (in the form of Proton). So Wine is stable & easy enough for non-tech users - at least for gaming purposes. But there isn't the equivalent for general software yet.

They just opened proton to non steam software in the latest beta. And from what people have been posting it works with a lot of windows applications.

That said, I was attempting to run a Proton game a few weeks back and it kept failing silently. Running from the terminal revealed a missing dependency, which I apt-getted and now it works fine. So while I agree that Proton is fantastic, there's still some work to be done in making it more friendly for "non-tech" users.

Is it not the case that if you use the steam runtime then libraries should be there? Ultimately valve are targeting steamOS not linux as a whole. Some linux distros (eg arch) have a package that bundles the steam runtime which should make such issues go away.

Steam runtime doesn't have every lib ever made, can collide with libraries in the system, and game devs might not include some dependencies because of licenses without notice. I think GP had the latter case.

Lutris is a popular Wine prefix manager. There is also PlayOnLinux.

> Will WINE ever be at a point where it would be stable enough to make the case for non-technical users?

On Linux - yes, on macOS - not likely, given the waning interest of Wine developers in doing it for macOS, thanks to Apple's sabotage of OpenGL, Vulkan and 32-bit support there.

If you are willing to fork some money, you can try crossover, these people contribute to wine project.

Buy Crossover - it employs a pile of the WINE developers, and their changes are fed back into the main codebase.

> Will WINE ever be at a point where it would be stable enough to make the case for non-technical users?

IMO for everyday use it pretty much already is.

Example: I installed MS Office 2010 using the official MS office installer, in a specially isolated Wine environment using a somewhat cumbersome command-line. This is expert-stuff, I agree, but what follows is not.

After the installer had completed Wine had picked up the application installations inside Windows and made them available (through wine) in my regular Linux application launcher with nice icons and everything.

I didn't lift a finger, and now I could use MS Word like any native Linux app anywhere in Gnome, even associate it with DOCX-files in Nautilus.

Call me easily impressed, but I found that above and beyond what I expected wine to do for me.

I wrote an app to do this on Mac several years ago, then abandoned it for lack of users. Crossover from CodeWeavers is a great GUI wrapper, but it's not free.

PlayOnMac is fairly user-friendly, relatively speaking. You do still have to interact with winetricks via a GUI, but I've been able to achieve everything I've wanted without ever using a CLI. Worth trying if you haven't, it's quite a lot smoother of an experience than Wineskin Winery.

Sure, there's Lutris or Steam's Proton to help with that. I wanted to try out Magic the Gathering Arena a few weeks ago. All I had to do was install Lutris, and that automatically set up Wine configs, installed dependencies, and even downloaded and installed the game.

I've found WineBottler on Mac to be fairly easy to use... you use it to install your program then it creates a standalone Mac executable which runs it in future

I guess it involves some freedesktop.org stuff so I'm not sure what happens in Mac OS, but when I install games with WINE I get a XDG menu item on my DE.

On macOS you install Wine then Wine runs all .exe files. Is that hard? If .exe files aren't associated with Wine then you can do that yourself from Get Info panel.

In Finder you can use Go to Folder. Just type ~/.wine/drive_c and add Program Files to the sidebar.

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