Hacker News Reader

Comment by la_barba | Hacker News Reader

You are discounting a very very large professional worker segment that relies of domain specific tools. We need more than a netbook with a browser. For e.g. In pharma, we wouldn't get any work done if we didn't use Windows. All of our software requires windows - analysis software, control software, automation software etc, etc. In our labs we're using software made for Windows XP on Windows 10, because it just works, and buying the newer version would cost thousands of dollars. If we were an architecture company we'd buy autocad or whatever, or if we were an accounting firm, we'd buy quickbooks or quicken, etc, etc.

View on HN

I wonder if WINE will ever be enough to cover all these cases. Though the cost of Windows licenses is generally trivial for businesses and they want support. I don't know how good RHEL for Workstations is but maybe that'd get more adoption in business if WINE was perfect and that desktop experience was as good as/better than Win10, or even had a DE made to be as similar as possible to Win10 to make it easier for employees to switch.

How can WINE ever be as good as Windows when it is forever doomed to play catchup with a vast team of developers and decades of secret compatibility hacks that make Windows behave differently for different applications on purpose? I know that the hacks exist in a special shim layer and Windows has a database of applications that require certain sets of shims enabled. But details like an actual documentation of the individual shims are secret.

Well the WINE folks have their heart in the right place, but its not really a good idea to re-implement a proprietary API for the purposes of binary compatibility. In any case, it makes sense for Windows Version N+1 to ensure compatibility with buggy applications that worked in Windows Version N. From an end-user standpoint I would hope all operating systems invest resources in ensuring application compatibility.

That shim layer makes sense. The real problem here is the lack of documentation. You can either reverse engineer aplication behaviour one application at a time to create your own layer or you can try to reverse engineer the database of hacks, which is skirting reverse engineering restrictions in the Windows EULA. Either one is time consuming.

Maybe if a big company started funding it.

Our industry is regulated so if you run the software using anything other than the vendor sanctioned way, the vendor will not validate your system, and without validation you cannot use it to produce or test any clinical material. Well you can try, but the FDA will simply close down your company. There simply isn't any business justification to change anything since what we have is working just fine. My larger point was that "office workers" includes lots and lots of industries where the domain-specific softwares are largely windows based.

WINE will never work for these use cases because the professional software is purchased and licensed for Windows. Not on Windows? No support for you. And each one of these (let's call them "Professional Computing Niches") has its own ecosystem of plugins and extensions and scripts and nonsense that have been built up over decades and are essential to keep things running. As a business you'd be bonkers to "switch" a working system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com