Hacker News Reader

> We also already have a simple way to run Windows applications, Wine.

Are you high? There is nothing simple about Wine. It's at once a kludgy mess and a technical masterpiece, what it isn't is simple.

View on HN

Depends. Proton and CrossOver are dead easy, especially for the supported apps.

Easy to use? Sure. Simple? No way.

https://support.codeweavers.com/en_US/2-getting-started/2-in...

Seems easy to me

Again, sure. Now try to contribute to the source.

https://www.christopherspenn.com/2021/08/simple-is-not-easy/

What source?

Proton/Wine/CrossOver.

Fairly simple for the end user, not simple in its implementation.

Like a lot of things in any OS it depends how far off the beaten track you go. I think there's a lot of gaming newcomers to linux where their main exposure for wine is via steam, which generally wraps things up for them and hides the details behind their launcher. If you need to go diving into the details for compatibility or you'd like to separate things out with prefixes then it's definitely much less polished and elegant, but I'd argue you could say the same thing about windows for compatibility with some old games or sites like PCGamingWiki.com would be a lot smaller as the combinations of windows (or DOS)+drivers+hardware over the years hasn't resulted in perfect consistent compatibility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com