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Comment by MagnumPIG | Hacker News Reader

Is the point of Wine not to avoid giving Microsoft money?

I think the point of wine is to have a Windows "runtime" that is open source and works on linux.

But I would gladly pay Microsoft to have a wine like thing that supports a broader range of software better, because I prefer Linux to Windows.

I dont mind Windows but being able to simply run Windows apps in a consistent way on Linux would really make my life much easier. The only downside would be the driver situation still sucks on Linux depending on GPU or other peripheral hardware but thats another fight for another day. Hell even being able to run the official Office binary on Linux would be great, course its been a rumor that might happen but theres plenty of software targetting Win32 that is useful.

Wine is the inverse effort of WSL. Both are trying to integrate the best of the other operating system. WSL -> Give Windows users a good modern web app development experience. Wine -> Give Linux users Office and games. To that end, both have their measure of success, and shortcomings. As someone who ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, I tried every incarnation of Wine I could get my hands on. In the end, I just always kept a Windows partition for playing games.

Proton may be your saviour*

*unless the games you play are online games with Anti-Cheat.

Given the hype, I almost want to reinstall Linux to try it out, and see what all the fuss is about.

And it's funny you bring up anti-cheat, because my biggest success using Wine was Battlefield 2, which actually ran more smoothly on my machine under Linux than Windows, but then I tried to get online, and learned a harsh lesson.

As someone who has invested time and energy into setting up Wine, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how painless it is to set up a Steam game with Proton. That is to say, you click 'install' as if you were installing a Native game and then when you click 'Play Game' it shows you a quick warning that Steam will be using a compatibility tool and then will boot up without any more fuss.

The caveat is largely that not all games are solved by this [0], and the official Valve whitelist needs to be turned off in settings to use it for all games, but even with these it's still a marked improvement in Quality of Life and barrier to entry for running Windows games on Linux.

I'd give it a go if you have time/inclination. I can recommend it as someone who is now Linux only as a result of this.

[0] - www.protondb.com

I've also run Linux for a long time, and have used Wine since before 1.0 to run some games, with very mixed results. Overall, the same experience for years - most games would have some issues, and many simply wouldn't run, so I kept Windows for gaming.

Proton was a dramatic change for me. A few clicks to enable Proton for a particular game, and then it just seamlessly runs and works. Granted, not all games do (check ProtonDB) but all the games I've wanted to play for the last couple of years have worked. I'd say Proton is the most significant thing to ever happen for Linux gaming support, and it did more for me overnight than many years of trying with Wine.

Modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat are mostly broken, some popular ones like Rainbow Six Siege are impossible to play. But if you mostly play other games, give Proton a try.

My use for it is to run the occasional app that requires Windows without accepting a EULA which permits spyware on my machine.

They are strict about their distance to Microsoft to avoid copyright law cases. They want to make sure it is a blackbox reimplementation and no internal knowledge came in.

Aside from that they are a an open source project, working on a open/libre alternative. Some people in the project certainly have issues with Microsoft, others don't.

No, free software is about freedom not money.

Not anymore. Anyone can install Windows for free (You will have the watermark).

AFAIK main revenue for MS is Azure and Office360, not Windows.

I would imagine they make a fair chunk of change from OEM Windows licenses?

If you were right this wouldn’t be a store page:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/windows

Windows 10 Home starts at $130, Pro is $200, and the business licenses start at $300. Given how much of Windows market share comes from business use, it’d be surprising they weren’t making a lot of money there. Since they’re a public company it’s easy to confirm that, yes, selling the most popular operating system in the world is profitable:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...

He is right though, watermarked w10 has no time limit, and comes with what seems only a few limitations, like inability to customize the taskbar location, for example.

This was pretty much always true. I remember the old versions just needed a serial. A single serial number that could be used any number of times worked just fine. Here in Iran, retailers sold Windows CDs with the same serial number printed on the covers.

Even when Windows detected that the license was fake, it basically didn't do anything. Some occasional messaging and a black background was the worst of it. I figure Microsoft understood that pressure on not-rich home users would just beef up its competition.

Non-activated Windows is limited. You cannot even enter the appearance features in the settings application when in such a state.

You can use it, sure. But between the watermark that is always on top and lack of being able to customize the OS I wouldn't want to use "free windows".

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