Wine and Linux

Is there a time in the foreseeable future when Wine will be able to universally run Windows programs under Linux?

 

Doubtful...

Wine History
https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_History

"Wine's roots can be traced back to 1993. At the time several forces were converging that made running Windows applications appealing. Microsoft had successfully steered its Windows program to the forefront of personal computers. IBM had hopes that OS/2 would catch on, but even they admitted that support of Windows programs was necessary and built the ability into their product. The free software movement spawned in the eighties was rapidly gaining ground as people discovered it was possible to run a multiuser, multitasking operating system on a PC.
...
Alexandre recalled some of the early milestones for Wine in a keynote he gave at the first Wineconf:

• May 1995: beginnings of Win32 support
• July 1995: switch to autoconf
• January 1996: Word and Excel reported to run
• November 1997: Creation of winehq.com web site

...
Wine 0.9.0 was declared "beta quality" in 2005 (more things working than not) and Wine 1.0 was finally released in mid-2008. Stable Wine is now released every year.

Development continues apace, with new development releases every two weeks. Wine has grown to over 1.4 million lines of C code over the past decade. Nearly 700 people have contributed in some fashion. As always, you can expect Wine to be released sometime this year; or maybe early next year. Or perhaps we'll just wait for you to become involved and finish those important user interfaces and documentation bits."

The Wine development release 3.2 is now available.
https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.2

Board index » WineHQ » Wine Help » Linux
https://forum.winehq.org/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=1f69bace425de072dd10297126912ba1

 

If you're interested in keeping your Windows stuff running, and you have the money, consider purchasing a license for VMWare Workstation for Linux. I can't say enough good things about running Windows within a VM on my Linux partition. Otherwise, something like VirtualBox may be of interest as well.

 

@MobileArtist
That's what I do, but personally I prefer the non-paid stuff to recommend, the paid stuff is kinda expensive, and you need to keep renewing support yearly - gets expensive!

$249 normally for Workstation Pro, and $149 for VMPlayer, but there is a 20% off sale right now:

VMWare online store
https://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/home

VMware incident support
https://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/cat/ThemeID.2485600/categoryID.65610900

Virtualbox works good, IDK how it does on Windows 10, as I don't run host or guest Windows 10 - waste of time.

Linux host and Windows Guests are usually best, but there is a steep learning curve for pass through and other nuanced configurations.

VMplayer works good too, but depending on release status of either, I can be found running both to keep something current and stable, YMMV, definitely there are times of woe for both.

I usually find a stable version and stick with it, and try to only have update parties a couple of times a year - update host OS, VM software, VM's, and VM OS updates.

Imagine your update timing dilemma's, now multiply by 3x!

When they all align it's sweet, try to recognize that and back it all up so you can recreate it.

 

WRT VMWare, a new license is ~$200 usd, and I guess you can pay for upgrades, but only when you want... Not annually. I just upgraded a 3.5 yr old license for the mighty mini.

I haven't had to do any configuration on the Linux host, and am running Win XP, Win 7,Win Server 2012, Win 10, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu guests. I can copy files to and from guest to host, copy text, etc... You just install the VMWare tools on the guest OS. Done.

I also love the new virtualized NVME drives supported in their new release. About the only issue I've encountered is that on a couple of occasions where there were 3, 4 or 5 guest virtual machines running (which I do multiple times a week), the Linux window manager became unresponsive and eventually crashed. But luckily Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to the rescue.


Note, I am not an employee nor affiliated with VMWare, just passing along my experiences.

 

My interest in Wine is because it bypasses the need for virtual machines altogether. My concern about virtual machines is that you're still loading Windows in some flavor into the VM. Even though the VM is walled off from the host operating system, I'm still concerned that older OSs, lacking security updates, may be vulnerable to all kinds of malware.

Again, I know that a VM is walled off, and isolated to a degree, but I'm not sure if anybody knows all the possible interactions. I'm no expert on virtual machines, although I've use them, and am a complete tyro when it comes to Linux. The possibility of cutting the cord from MS is certainly tempting.

So Wine will always be limited?

 

I am no Wine expert, and can't say for certain. but have seen enough to know that not everything runs flawlessly on Wine.

In terms of security, if something breaks through Windows app on Wine it would be executing within the user space of Wine on your system.

If something breaks thru Windows within a VM, in theory it would still be executing within the confines of the virtualized hardware. It would next have to break thru that and then thru the vm software to run on the system.

At least that is how I believe it would break down.

 

This whole subject of how impregnable the host OS is to a compromised VM OS is fascinating and confusing at once. I imagine one backdoor to infection would be a shared folder, which allows transfers of files between both "machines".

Linux in its many flavors is great, but in order for it to attract users of Windows programs it needs to be seamless.

I often use Naturally Speaking for example, and it will will work on Linux with limited functionality.

So I applaud Linux, and would like to be out of the snares of MS, mainly because they are heedless to the needs and requests of its users. Why impose an increasingly cloud based, intrusive OS like 10 on a population which clearly doesn't want it? There are still large numbers of holdovers using XP, let alone 7 and 8.1.

MOD EDIT: No politics, please.

 

You know, i was tempted to call the thread Days of Wine and Cirrhosis.