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Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone out there who can just let your voice be heard if you use Wine and it has been a frustration free experience?

Do you use it for serious applications, or mostly just curious if you can manage an iTunes install?

What have you failed to install? What have you succeeded to install, even partially?

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I ran some electric circuit simulation/PCB design software through Wine for a series of courses that actually worked very well. I think the only installation hurdle was installing the Jet database engine (wasn't included with the install). Real-time simulations were a bit slower than they should have been on my machine (no less than some lower end machines I saw, though). Otherwise, it was on par performance and behavior-wise. That has been my most serious use of it, and I found it to be pretty frustration free.

On the flip side, there was an oscilloscope/fgen software interface that did not work at all thanks to some horrible drivers, but it didn't work on 50% of Windows machines either, so I didn't mind too much. There were alternatives in that case.

Indeed configuring Wine to run something can involve a lot from installing different depedencies to .dll overrides. Different configs for different applications are also a bit painful.

But other than this, Wine is great.

I use it all the time.

Things I want to work that don't: 1) NVDA screen reader. 2) 32bit applications in macOS Catalina.

At least for #2 there's CrossOver, but it's somewhat expensive just for "this one weird trick winehq doesn't want you to know".

For games, I've found using wine though Lutris (https://lutris.net/) to be mostly frustration-free. To avoid the need to toy around trying to find a configuration of wine version, dlls to add/override/etc., and other settings that wine provides, Lutris provides a "recipes" for creating an environment that someone has verified works for the given application. It has a lot of recipes for non-gaming applications as well, although I haven't used it for much of that personally.

I am using crossover (but because of Catalina and the 64bit thing ;previously using wine) for Mathematica. No issues at all.

I use it for ODE (numericsal and symbolic) and some integration, etc. No fancy stuff but no bugs whatsoever.

I use it for games, like Magic The Gathering Arena, without too much problems.

I use it with 1password 4. Works like a charm.

I use it for Sonos and Office, works great.

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