A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years Though it may not have managed to bring Linux to the desktop in any meaningful sense, 4 July marks 25 years since the first stable release of not-a-Windows-emulator, Wine. Created in 1993 as a way of inflicting Windows 3.1 applications on the then positively pristine Linux world (mastermind Linus Torvalds had only just emitted …
Does the absence of MS Office matter as much as the absence of Visual Studio?
Older versions of Office, even older versions of ‘New’ office, with its ribbon and compressed .xxxX documents, work well.
But no full, modernish, version of Visual Studio works.
Then again, does it matter nowadays? We live in a *nix world now - the Lions share of the market belongs to Android, iOS, ChromeOS, macOS and Linux. Dare I say it but, other than for gaming and doing the accounts, poor old Windows is looking a bit…
…anachronistic.
Does the absence of MS Office matter as much as the absence of Visual Studio?
I remember having fun getting an Ubuntu box to run Visual Studio on WINE (can't recall which version, but it was going back a while because it was on Breezy Badger version of Ubuntu).
We'd been trying WINE for the first time to get something else running, but when we hit snags some bright spark had the idea of getting VS running so that we could debug the application. A bit of an eye-watering task, but IIRC we succeeded
Access and Outlook don't work so well, and they are the two office applications that don't have such good alternatives on Linux
In the case of the former, that may not be such a bad thing. I've seen a few examples of systems which have been put together by staff (not professional software developers) who can hack in Access. Perhaps it's well-intentioned, but in so many cases the result far exceeds what Access was intended for, and really should been written as a "proper" application.
If nothing else, Access was (what I've seen of the most recent versions is not so appealing) quite a good teaching tool for databases, and the query designer on top of a 'proper' database would be a handy tool.
What I don't miss, now I longer need to deal with it regularly, is the tendency to refactor existing queries into ones that don't work. And to flatly deny the possibility of any mildly complicated outer join.
And then there was the person who spent months building a database in it, which eventually transpired to be some nice forms backed by a collection of unrelated and very wide tables...
Theres only one lesson to learn from it - dont store data in Access.
I wouldn't dispute that. (Though really, of the Access dbs I inherited, only one had to be regularly repaired, and it was a few hundred MB.) But some kind of graphical query builder is quite handy to teach people concepts. Yes they probably need to learn syntax eventually if they're going to be making more sophisticated use, but when trying to show someone 'this is an inner join, this is a subquery, this is a critereon, this is what grouping does' spending time correcting typing errors is just a distraction.
>[Access not being available on Linux] may not be such a bad thing. [...] in so many cases the result far exceeds what Access was intended for, and really should been written as a "proper" application.
Agreed, but for each case where the business needs end up outgrowing Access, there must be tens or hundreds of cases where somebody who may not be a full-time developer was able to put together a small Access app that does what they need quickly and cheaply.
I sometimes need to fix something small in the house - I'm not a professional plumber, and I don't have a set of professional tools; this doesn't stop me from replacing the occasional gasket, using some generic screwdriver or wrench I happen to have around. And I disagree with the idea that wrenches shouldn't be available to non-professional plumbers because they're sometimes not the right tool for the job.
So, why you care about VS support? Isn't Eclipse enough for you?
Anyway, most of the grunt work on desktop systems is still done on Windows and macOS system - the only two system for which most real professional applications are available. Because it's applications that matters, not the OS. Wine was an attempt to close that gap, but it was a too big task without a big company and funds behind. That gap is still very large.
And you can't really do much with your phone... beyond consuming contents made elsewhere, or messaging around.
@ "Anyway, most of the grunt work on desktop systems", I take it you are talking about work performed by grunts as opposed to HPC.
As to applications, they are written to run on the the OS that the customer uses, for years workers ended up with windows not because it was the best or most fitting but rather because it was "what was most used" but that is no longer the case.
That windows is still considered for business is purely down to the number of existing workers who have got used to earlier version of the OS and particular appllications. That MS have repeatedly and radically changed their products in the same period is forgotten in the same way that bad memories slip from the mind after enough time.
Linux can and does offer applications to perform the same task but when an employee's wage is dependant upon using "that application" then ofc they will make certain that it is seen as an important job requirement.
Add in the number of educational institutions and "professionals" that still force MS products as their default platform and you are left with a lot of captive audiences learning yesterdays tech.
Not really suprising how insecure the IT industry is, given that so many "professionals" are pushing what they know to be poison
"Performing the same task" - more or less - is not enough. A lot depends on the time taken, the quality delivered, and how well it fits in the application ecosystem you're using.
There are many professional applications that have no real Linux counterpart, but simpler ones good for a basic usage.
Workers don't care about the application they use, as long as they know it will deliver the right outcome in the right time.
This is something Linux worshiper stubbornly refuse to understand, they believe their OS is so great people should use it even if the applications are inferior compared to macOS and Windows ones.
GPL (especially when it means lack of paying customers) and being often far less integrated than macOS and Windows are also reasons why developing desktop applications for Linux may not be a good investment.
being often far less integrated than macOS and Windows...
Far less integrated in some company's scheme to make money at the expense of their users, also. It's not that Linux people necessarily think Linux is so far superior to Windows or MacOS that everyone should be falling over themselves to use it, but that it is good enough and that it frees its users from the whims of someone else's corporate moneymaking scheme. "Windows as a Service" comes immediately to mind here.
There are clearly areas that Linux lags behind Windows, but with Windows 10... that crap isn't worth using for free, let alone paying through the nose for it. If you want a black-box OS with a rapid update schedule so its maker can put in gaming mode and other inane features no one asked for, and to massively destabilize the OS with these biannual huge updates just as they've tripled the pace of the rollout schedule, using consumers (who never use/test enterprise features, since they're consumers) as beta testers because they downsized the actual beta testers for cost savings, and all the while imposing ongoing training costs as they keep changing things in their touch-UI oriented OS that 99% of people use with a traditional mouse/touchpad and keyboard, then by all means, Windows 10 is for you. Well, it's not really for you... it's clearly for Microsoft. Everyone else is on their own.
One would wonder how badly people have to be beaten and abused by MS before they finally overcome their Stockholm syndrome and move on. Yes, surely it will be painful for a while, and especially for the first movers, but it has to be done. MS has clearly communicated its intent to everyone... it is going to keep forcing its sub-mediocre crap down our throats and monetizing us without mercy, and that shall be that. I think that the bewildered Windows users out there are still thinking this has to change, that the dark times will pass, but the purveyor of those dark times has already told us that they won't. MS wants to be a cloud services company, so the two possible outcomes of the Windows 10 pain train are (1) people sit there and allow themselves to be monetized without trying to escape, in an apt demonstration of learned helplessness, or (2) people will eventually move on to some other platform, which means MS can stop with Windows completely and be the cloud provider it wants to be-- and all those former Windows customers are welcome to still be Microsoft customers from someone else's OS, since cloud services are inherently platform-agnostic.
Either one of those outcomes is just fine with Microsoft. Going back to the old way, where monetizing Windows was only about collecting licensing fees, where Microsoft's fortunes appeared to be headed downhill along with PC sales (while the fixed costs of Windows development failed to scale down with the customer demand), I would think it is safe to say, is out of the question. The cloud guy who is killing Windows is presiding over a Microsoft with soaring share prices while writing books about how awesome he is and how he got Microsoft's groove back by abusing the core customers who got MS to where they are today. We're not going back to the old model (with that nasty, mean Microsoft of the Gates and Ballmer eras, which I keep hearing was so much worse than it is now), and the Windows 10 pain has just begun. Best to start planning the exit now rather than later... it's going to have to happen, but how much is the company going to be fleeced by MS in the meantime?
Nice rant.
CAD software is one area where it would be nice to have some compatibility through wine. I use and have used Linux for the last 20 years or so and I would love to get rid of the Virtualbox running an XP guest that my CAD application runs on.
"CAD software" and linux
Unlike the windows world most linux "administrators" are required to be able to code and there are indeed CAD products availible for linux (paid for and free that all export to DXF) but if you do not like them for any reason you could always write your own for the time it takes you to knock up a vector drawing app.
If you take the XOR cursor patent company as an example then they will continue pushing windows whilst you keep buying it, once you stop then you can bet their products would move across.
God I wish I could upvote that more than once. The only people who think that the simulacra are as good as the originals are people who don't actua;l;y have to do any meaningful work on the applications.
Just remind me about the latest OS market share scores again?
Well, as long as you do your work on a phone or tablet, I guess you're right.
But as far as working on company applications are concerned, we're still squarely a Windows PC world. I've been consulting for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere. I have spotted a few Linux servers, here and there, but zero workstations. I have also seen a few Apple PCs, mainly in web development.
But the bulk of them are Windows PCs.
And that will stay that way until the *Nix generation becomes Head of IT and/or CEO. Only then will we see the possibility of a switch, because these guys and gals will look at licensing fees for Windows and Office, the backlog of Helpdesk issues and the nightmare of legacy crap still being dragged along and they will choke on their coffee before chucking the whole mess out.
But before that ? Not a chance.
Part of the problem is also that in the industry that I work in, the apps are largely written for windows machines. (and badly written at that, but that's another, longer rant.) Part of it is simply lack of competition - there are something like three our four companies that offer the combination of hardware and software that our business runs on, and it's extremely expensive (9 digits, the first of which is greater than 1!) to switch between them as they do *not* interoperate whatsoever. One of these vendors uses a version of Java that has more security holes than a swiss cheese factory, and their installer for another one of their apps uses .NET 1.1 (I <b.wish</b> I was joking!)
There's also the thing of the vendors being picky about what OS the workstations will support; we are working on migrating to windows 10 (reluctantly, due to a different set of requirements for another application!) and the question came up of if the vendor will support the client app if it's running on that OS.
" So your industy is owned by MS? perhaps if your leaders had a clue they would form a guild and use the license money to get the job done properly. "
LOL, you need to enter the real world.
A business is there to make money for the owners of the business and shareholders. they put all their time into maximising those profits, yes, they can spend £100,000,000+ on computer systems that are essential to running their facility and the number of companies that can supply those systems can be very small and as in this case, the providers systems all have drawbacks. But so you think for a minute the people who have the authority in a business to open up the wallet to the tune of $100k plus have not looked into an in-house built system? even the possibility of collaborating with competitors to produce a perfect system.
the primary concern will be
1, will this system make our company more profitable
2, how long will it take to install the system to get those new profits
3, if something fails, who is going to pay to fix it, its not going to come out of our profits.
4, will it be significantly different in operation to what we have already, the cost of training will come out of those profits.
So, when the bloke in the expensive suit goes to see the people in more expensive suits to explain the plan that they could do it better in house, the answer to the 4 point above will be, Yes, don't know, us, and us, but the answer to the question if we get an outside contractor will be, yes, 6 months, but for every day over we get £10k off the bill... they will, we will have included in the price a service contract, its the same company we used last time, so its going to be minimal staff training...
You can potentially come up with a better system, but thats not how big businesses work. they want and need stability, or someone to blame for any instabilities. developing in house can and has killed off companies. that's something the blokes in expensive suits will not risk..
"But before that ? Not a chance."
even after that, you have the expense of training staff into using a brand new environment and applications. These days you are expected to be proficient in MS office to get a job where you have to work on a pc...
when you add in the cost of training, not only for users, but support staff that will support nix is going to cost more that the 10 a penny windows help-desk staff... TCO is still going to be way above a windows environment...
its going to ve a very very lng time before nix of any flavour makes it in the work environment
"I've been consulting for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere"
I think what you mean is:
"I've been consulting in Windows technologies for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere".
...which is fair enough and not too surprising. But hear this:
I have been consulting in Unix technologies for companies for a quarter of a century. And I have seen Unix go from a high-end science/engineering/financial platform to an everyday commodity. I am writing this on a Linux "workstation" (laptop). Earlier I took a call on Unix (an Android phone). Later I will check my email on Unix (an Android tablet), probably while watching a Youtube video on Unix (a Raspberry Pi running Kodi). When I click "Submit", this comment will be transmitted by a Unix server (my Netgear router) to The Register's server (unix again),...
...well you get the point. Despite which, I like MS and I like Bill Gates. And I'm happy for Windows to dominate the Desktop.
"LINUX Is Not UniX"
Actually it's - GNU is Not Unix. Linux isn't GNU, it only has lots of GNU software installed on it, sometimes, but the Linux kernel itself isn't GNU. You can actually have a Linux OS without any GNU software on it.
Have an upvote for "WINDOWS Is Not Dos, Or Windows Soon".
"I've been consulting for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere"
I think what you mean is:
"I've been consulting in Windows technologies for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere".
The first Unix (properly Unix, probably Solaris) workstation I saw was in the chemistry department as an undergrad (or maybe even doing a tour on university open days). I'm now in an office surrounded by people working on Linux (with an L) workstations and about half of them also have Macs (used as a Unix platform). The type of software we use largely does not run on windows, or at least not well. I've got Windows in a VM if I find a need to use MS Office. Or to put it another way, Linux desktops definitely exist.
"We live in a *nix world now - the Lions share of the market belongs to Android, iOS, ChromeOS, macOS and Linux."
When the Macintosh operating system became Unix based, I said that the OS wars are over, Unix won, but no one told Microsoft. Though now that they are adding bits of Ubuntu to Windows, I guess they are catching up to the rest of the world.
> "You forgot PlayStation & Nintendo (Switch). "
> According to NetMarketShare that's currently at 0.01% if taken as a percentage of all computing devices, so yeah...
It was about "*nix world we living now", not about "desktop PC ("workstation") part of it".
NetMarketShare is inappropriate for that measuring.
Whole "IoT" market relies on *nix (smart TV, watches...). Mostly the same stands for automakers.
(e.g. AML: https://www.automotivelinux.org/).
"sales of current-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony > 103 million at the end of 2017"
(73.6 PS <> 29.4 Xbox One)
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/05/report-ps4-has-now-sold-roughly-2-5-times-as-well-as-the-xbox-one/
"Console gaming is the second-largest segment generating $34.6 billion in 2018 while PC games will bring in $32.9 billion."
https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/30/newzoo-global-games-expected-to-hit-180-1-billion-in-revenues-2021/
At this point it is just a waiting game. Just let Windows and Mac OS X "appstore" themselves out of existence and the only alternative will pretty much be Linux at that point*.
*BSD, Haiku, ReactOS will then take the current place of Linux as solid alternatives. Then when Linux screws up, one of the others will step up and the cycle will continue.
The important thing is we have alternatives. Otherwise we will be at the absolute mercy of a phenomenon known as Operating System inbreeding which Windows (i.e Metro, UWP, DRM, Developer Licenses) seems to be experiencing now.
*BSD, Haiku, ReactOS will then take the current place of Linux as solid alternatives. Then when Linux screws up, one of the others will step up and the cycle will continue.
I expect by the time Linux screws up that bad, ReactOS *might* have reached v1.0.0... Or maybe not, if the Gnome and SystemD folks keep going the way they are.
(don't get me wrong, I'd like ReactOS to progress much faster, and it could have been further along if companies hadn't been such *cowards* when XP's expiration was looming).
"Unfortunately, ... the most popular supported programs on Wine are games."
This, I found, was the problem. They concentrated on performance for gaming at the expense of H/W portability. In particular they deliberately assumed display drivers reporting 24-bit pixels would handle 32-bit because they preferred word alignment. It led to a lot of bug reports where applications would crash on commodity H/W with Intel video.
As they regarded it as a feature the reports went unaddressed which didn't stop them sending out automated emails when new versions were released asking if it had been fixed yet. I kept recompiling new versions with a simple patch until (a) I got fed up, (b) the application I was interested in stopped using a 32-bit splash screen which was the only bit that caused the crash.
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If I understood your problem correctly, the solution is simple:
Use two Wineprefixes: one at ~/.wine64 (64-bit) and another at ~/.wine (32-bit)
First, delete all prefixes.
Then, create a clean 32-bit prefix:
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64 wine winecfg
$ killall wine
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.wine WINEARCH=win32 wine winecfg.
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Surely you could run each from its own script that sets the appropriate value of WINEPREFIX.
Yup, that works.
!#/usr/bin/sh
WINEPREFIX=[path-to-prefix] wine [path-to-prefix+pathinsidewineprefixtoexe]/program.exe
Wine also puts a .desktop file together (and links in DESKTOP folder in native .desktop file and windows .ink).
You can run 32bit and 64bit applications in wine simultaneously.
What you can't do is mix 32 and 64 bit applications in the same wine prefix.
As long as each application is installed on their own separate profile they can be run simultaneously.
there are two executables wine (32 bit) and wine64 (64 bits) Wine knows which one to use depending on the configuration of the profile, that is why only the command "wine" is generally used.
Hope this helps.
What you can't do is mix 32 and 64 bit applications in the same wine prefix.
Not so sure that is accurate (or at least I have had few problems doing it).
I've Hexagon (32bit) on the same prefix as DazStudio (64bit) - a necessarily if I want to use the bridge to send objects from Studio to Hexagon for modelling.
I've not come up against any issues (at least yet).
It's not recommended though, but then mostly Wine support recommended "a clean 32bit prefix" only for best results not long ago.
Don't think the killall is necessary.
I've been using Wine to run Daz Studio for a year (yes, Blender is fun too).
Both the 32bit and 64bit versions run (and Nvidia Iray renders run rather well on Wine, for the 3Delight renders I use the linux native version).
Start of 2017, you would have struggled to run the 64bit version, but the 32bit version worked, it's been mostly improving as Wine matures.
I have the 32bit version and the 32bit installer for the Daz shop on a 32bit prefix, and the 64bit on a separate (64bit) prefix with the recent 64bit version of the installer + Hexagon modeller, which is 32bit, runs ok on the 64bit prefix (has to be on the same prefix for the bridge from Daz studio to Hexagon to work).
Yes, I might have a better experience running the program on the native Windows, but (run Windows, are you mad?).
"If I understood your problem correctly, the solution is simple:"
Yeah. Those obvious, intuitive commands, environment variables passing into other environment variables, etc. etc. etc.
I mean, I understand everything its doing and why. But I wouldn't be able to guess at that in a million years.
Could always use PlayonLinux
Has a nice simple GUI based setup* (or buy Codeweavers Crossover - who are based on the Wine source and contribute back and also have a nice user friendly interface).
* or used to, I'm not a fan of their new version in java, but there'e a Qt version as an alternate coming.
"Could always use PlayonLinux"
One problem with Playonlinux, there is very litlte help available. I've tried without success to join their forums and have tried to contact them directly. Nothing heard. Also don't try asking for help with POL at WineHQ. I made that mistake and got a very dusty answer. It seems that the people at Wine don't particularly care for those at POL.
The short answer is: POL is fine if it all works. If not you are mostly on your own.
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