Wine 9.0 RC1 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS | Hacker News Reader

Wine 9.0 RC1 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS

winehq.org

93 pointsneustradamus46 comments

TIL Solaris is still actively developed, with the last release being from mid-September! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris

The project that is no longer actively developed is OpenSolaris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris

There are Illumos distributions such as OpenIndiana that fill the void left by OpenSolaris.

Mandatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

i'm a diehard Windows fan, but Linux is so awesome these days i'm almost ready to have Linux be my default GRUB entry

I used to religiously read the Wine release entries, looking for fixes and improvements. For me it was an indispensable tool in making Linux more usable. However nowadays (specially in the last 3 years or so) Linux has matured so much that I rarely need it for running applications, most Linux counterparts seem to satisfy me. For games I've also mostly switched to Steam's more convenient method of running Windows games.

Care to share what "Steam's more convenient method of running Windows games" is?

I love Linux, but gaming is the only thing keeping me going back to Linux as my main OS. I heard that Linux can play most steam games except Multiplayer online games due to the anti-cheat software not being designed for windows.

It's completely behind the scenes now. If you have Steam on Linux, there's a setting you enable to allow the "Proton" compatibility layer (Valve's fork of Wine), and all Windows games appear in your library list. That's it. You install and run them like any native game, and aside from a bit longer start up the first time you launch a game, the experience is indistinguishable. I imagine a significant portion of Steam Deck owners have no idea they're not using Windows. I actually wish they would add some badge to a game entry so I can tell what's native, because it's hard to tell.

In some cases, even anti-cheat works. Games that use EasyAntiCheat (EAC) and the devs have enabled linux compatibility and you install the Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime, you might be good to go. I'm not sure how common it is yet for all those requirements to be met though.

Look at steam deck compatibility as a reference point. The number of games that can run on Linux today is staggering. I tend to assume that games work rather than do not, and that assumption holds about 95% of the time.

https://www.protondb.com/

For those that use kagi search, you might want to add a custom bang for proton db. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=%s

Kagi uses the same bangs as duckduckgo (and more), so there should already be 4 different bangs for it

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs?q=protondb

Oh nice. Not sure how I missed those.

You hit the nail on the head. Games requiring DRM or anti-cheat probably won't run. Its something Valve has been working on, but its been slow going. Other than that, 99% of the games I've tried have just worked.

Some do

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

old news

> except Multiplayer online games

That's no longer the case. I'd say about now, there are more multiplayer games that you can play, as opposed to ones you can't play.

See: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ as reference, but it's not very up-to-date, so https://www.protondb.com/ would probably be a better reference.

You no longer have to install wine or manually configure games beyond what you would on Windows.

You simply install Steam, and Proton (kind of a fork of Wine) will be installed to provide compatibility for Windows games for you, in a transparent manner.

Proton has greatly increased the compatibility and performance of Windows games on Linux. In some cases, it's faster on Wine than on Windows (in part because some Windows APIs are stubbed on Wine).

Proton DB has the list of Steam games and user reports for how well they are supported under Proton.

Steam uses Proton + Wine under the hood and yeah it works pretty great these days!

Proton is wine + dxvk/vkd3d + more patches.

How and why does one become a diehard windows fan?

any advice for switching to Linux?

I think my best tip would be to remain persistent. If you're like me, I can get frustrated easily when I'm proficient with $tool1 and $tool2 can do the same thing but in a different way. It's then easy for me to just go back to $tool1.

For gaming specifically, AMD graphics cards tend have fewer driver problems than Nvidia (though some Nvidia users don't ever run into issues). Commonly recommended distros are Arch (or Arch-based like EndeavourOS), Pop!_OS and Fedora.

That really depends on your requirements, workflow, and the type of PC/hw you're planning to run it on.

But a general advice would be give it a good try first on your real hardware before you switch to it, and approach it with a mindset that this is a completely different operating system, and not everything will work the way it used to in Windows - you may need to ditch some software completely, and change the way you do certain things. If you rely on programs like Wine or Proton you should expect bugs. If you have an nVidia GPU, there's a good chance you'll run into issues or limitations sooner or later.

Only attempt switching if you're prepared to deal with all this, and have tons of patience.

Other than that, a good way to try out Linux would be to install Ventoy[1] on a USB drive, and copy a bunch of different Linux ISOs to it. Ventoy allows you to boot from multiple different ISOs/image files, so you don't need to prepare a different bootable USB every time. Some ISO recommendations: Pop!_OS, Zorin, ElementaryOS, Nobara, Linux Mint

[1]: https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

I really can't imagine anything worse than trying to support the Windows API. I'm sure there are those of us here who still have nightmares from the famous Charles Petzold "Programming Windows" book. In this 1500+ page tomb the author takes us through writing various "simple" Windows programs that use the Win32 API. Doing this lets you write programs on Windows that have minimal dependencies... But big disclaimer... it ain't easy.

Windows API functions are known universally for their monstrous number of parameters. Mountains and mountains of arguments that are 'reserved', 'optional', 'undefined', 'undocumented', 'hidden', 'deprecated', and so on. What made Windows so successful for developers and users was ensuring that every new release remained backwards compatible. That which is Windows biggest feature now becomes it's biggest flaw leading to an inhuman API. I imagine somewhere in hell there is a level reserved for torturing programmers. In this level they are forced to re-implement software with Win32 functions while the devil laughs 'come on! It's only 15,000 lines! You can do it!'

Here we see the Wine developers doing this 'for fun.' One can only conclude from this that they are either masochists or have gone totally insane.

It might be complex, but at least is stable. Nothing is deprecated and only sightly extended, with most processes relying on old APIs. Microsoft, when doing the counterpart (supporting linux kernel syscalls) just gave up and resorted to VM.

Because the shit filesystem API of Windows, not because there was a problem with Linux/Unix syscalls. At the end, is more IO perfomant to run a VM using a file as hard disk (or a real hard disk), that using the windows native filesystem API under the simple POSIX filesystem API.

The majority of Wine contributions comes from CodeWeavers, the company providing commercial support for Wine and working on Proton with Valve. Google is funding development of Wayland support on Wine which is being worked on by a Collabora developer. This is so far from doing this just 'for fun', though I'm sure most of them actually have fun working on this.

Does Directory Opus work on Wine? I think that's the only app that's keeping me on Windows. Nothing comes close to it in terms of the set of features when it comes to file management on Linux or MacOS.

Reading the list of features I see that dolphin from kde under Linux checks a lot of those boxes, which ones in particular do you miss?

Not sure about Directory Opus, but Total Commander on windows (and Double Commander on other platforms, attempt to recreate TC, partial success) can do a lot of stuff. E.g. powerful mass rename, advanced queue management for file operations, intelligent "resume" for larger file copying - it checks beginning/end bytes plus ~3 random points inside to to be sure you can continue on copying that huge file cut in the middle. You can color files/folders by conditions, e.g. files/folders created today are red and music files with bitrate 128 or lower are gray. Also, lister (built in preview on F3) - you can scroll through dozen-GB sized log file in seconds. Search is great, you can find duplicate images bigger than 512x512 and show them on file panel for any processing. And plugings. Lots of plugins. For archive formats, for lister, for mass-rename, for file system, for additional columns etc

Double Commander? Basically clone of Total Commander

Isn't that an Amiga app?

I can't switch to Linux because I need fully functional Microsoft 365 desktop apps; mainly Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Are there any reasonable options beyond running Windows in a VM?

> I need fully functional Microsoft 365 desktop apps; mainly Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Why? There are alternatives to those three that work well on Linux, namely OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

They support the same files, but in terms of features they aren't equivalent, especially in a business environment.

Do the web browser offerings of those apps not cut it?

Not quite. For example, the web apps don't support COM add-ins.

Do the opposite and run WSL?

Probably the best advice, to be honest. At least it's what I do after getting tired off issues like nvidia screen tearing and things just not working as smoothly as they do in windows (for me, at least).

Does anyone know if vivado works on Wine / Macos?

The day Altium ends up running properly under Wine - is the day I remove the Windows installation on my device.

Seems to be close https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

Make sure you report your specific problems. For the stuff that's not used by general population you need to put in some work, but I got a couple of apps fixed through bug reports.

How does a non developer do that? I have 2-3 accounting softwares that don't seem to work.

Emsigner (digital signature tool) which is built for income tax only also doesn't work but don't know how I can attempt small fixes.

Have a look at the troubleshooting section in the docs https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Troubleshooting for information how to get the logs, then report the issue to their bugtracker. Describe what fails and how and hopefully the logs will be enough to debug it. If they're not, you'll get more detailed questions.

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