Hacker News Reader

Comment by momokoko | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about Wine's usage and relevance at this point in the Linux desktop story. My assumption is that Linux users(myself included) that use Windows applications(not games), tend to just run a VM in seamless mode for Windows functionality.

I would be curious if others had any insight(anecdotal or otherwise) about Wine usage these days.

View on HN

Fantasy Grounds is virtual tabletop RPG software, for doing things like playing D&D or Call of Cthulhu with friends over the internet. It's a desktop application which all participants install, and the players' computers connect to the computer of the person running the game. It has features to handle various polyhedral dice and modifiers, character sheets and stats, maps, etc.

A full discussion of FG or a comparison vs the browser-based competitor Roll20 would be off-topic, but the company behind FG officially supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Their app is a Windows app on all platforms. For Linux, they test and document Wine, and I can confirm firsthand that it works.

For Mac, I think Wine is involved too, but although they do have documentation about that case, I think most of FG's Mac users (and many of their Windows users) install it via Steam without having to care about Wine. They don't have a version packaged through Steam for Linux.

This example may go away in 2019 or in an upcoming year: they're working on a rewrite to be based on Unity. But this isn't a case where they can just use Unity for the next game in a series. They have a long-standing product with a lot of features and users that shouldn't be broken in the transition, and a small staff that has other priorities alongside the rewrite. The product just happens to be a tool for gaming. So the rewrite has understandably been a slow years-long background effort.

I use Wine from time to time, because some vendors (especially hardware vendors) still expect you to have Windows for silly reasons (eg. to write an update file on an USB key for a car GPS — I'm looking at you, Renault — or to unlock a phone bootloader — I'm looking at you, Xiaomi). That's a life saver in such cases and I can't state how grateful I am for Wine to exist.

And no, I won't run Windows in a VM as I refuse to pay the “Windows tax”.

(Also for games, I still rely a lot on Wine — even if mostly hidden behind Lutris these days.)

You can grab free Windows VMs that Microsoft provides for browser testing. They expire after 90 days, but they are usable for the purposes you mention (except gaming).

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

Okay, I'll be that guy this time: Why the downvotes? This is a bit hacky and only allows temporary systems, but it appears to be functional, free-as-beer, and works fine for these random one-off cases.

Don't worry about the downvotes friend, they are merely silly internet points. Someone might come across the comment in the future and find it helpful, and that's all that matters.

Well said. As the person you replied to, I find your answer helpful. Thank you!

Per the license terms [1]:

You may use the software for testing purposes only. You may not use the software for commercial purposes. You may not use the software in a live operating environment.

[1] - https://az792536.vo.msecnd.net/vms/release_notes_license_ter...

Apart from this being essentially an EULA an therefore not necessarily binding in your country, I don't think that doing the stuff described in the OP would violate these terms.

And if it does violate the terms, let's remember we live in the real world and absolutely nothing will happen to them as a result

Used this to run some Windows-only NES Classic / SNES Classic "hacking" program thingy (hakchi2? Something like that) to add more games to those two devices. Worked great. Wine was a no-go because the program itself did some stuff with (Windows) drivers when needed. VirtualBox. Worked great. I have a Win10 license and could have dug it out but this was easier.

Amusingly enough, all of the low-level hardware access stuff in hakchi2 seems to be done through Windows ports of various Linux-based libraries and tools. The Windows drivers are just there to emulate the normal Linux APIs for low-level USB access. In principle, it would be possible to just chop out all the layers of emulation and drop in the original Linux USB access library using the actual Linux APIs (compiled as a Wine-style DLL so the Windows code could use it) and everything should work fine.

> some vendors (especially hardware vendors) still expect you to have Windows for silly reasons (eg. to write an update file on an USB key for a car GPS — I'm looking at you, Renault — or to unlock a phone bootloader — I'm looking at you, Xiaomi).

Does this kind of stuff work in Wine for you? I generally need to use a VM, because if it needs to talk to another device drivers are involved.

I used to run foobar2000 in wine, because no other linux media player scratched some of the itches foobar covered. There is even a foobar2000 package in the arch aur so it simply installs like any other pacman managed program.

However, once I learned of the wine interface that is available on flathub (for flatpak) I immediately removed wine and its 32 bit components from my system- now that untidyness is neatly contained within flatpak dependencies.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't flatpak'd wine solve this issue?

Yes, fb2k is the one Windows-only app I just can't let go. The library management, plugins, UI, extensibility, and configurability are just simply unmatched by anything else out there. I likes my music the way I likes it.

Yes, except now instead of one horrifically over complicated package manager you now have to have two.

> foobar2000

I was sure that was a placeholder for you to avoid naming the program until one of the other replies to this comment seemed to confirm that it was in fact an actual name of a program.

I'm using Clementine (qt) as a replacement, it's working very nicely :)

A lot of people are extremely dependent on Wine (myself included) to run Steam games through Proton. I have a VFIO-enabled VM reserved for games that don't work, but it's much more convenient to be able to just play games on Linux.

> My assumption is that Linux users(myself included) that use Windows applications(not games), tend to just run a VM in seamless mode for Windows functionality.

Running in a VM requires an additional Windows license. I'm not even sure if you're allowed to use an OEM license for a VM, or if you need proper retail or even one of those "VDA licenses". It's precisely this kind of stuff why I still use Wine.

> Running in a VM requires an additional Windows license. I'm not even sure if you're allowed to use an OEM license for a VM, or if you need proper retail or even one of those "VDA licenses".

Of I understand correctly, and I might not, you either need an Enterprise license or a VDA subscription and you need the user PC that will access the VM to also have its own desktop (pro or enterprise) license if you aren't using a VDA subscription x (that it, it is a license precondition for the VM license that the PC has its own license in addition to any licenses for VMs.) Windows desktop VM licensing seems to be oriented around corporate VDI setups, not desktop-on-desktop local VM use.

If you're running it in a VM locally on a desktop, my understanding is that you're fine with a normal every-day OS license because the machine itself is what the license applies to. However, MS licensing is needlessly obtuse and, in my experience, nothing short of consulting with about a dozen different "specialists" will even approximate a correct answer, if one even exists.

I think you are most definitely correct when you are running Windows on a remote VM, like on an ESX. But I always thought that things would be more lenient when you're running it locally, but I might be mistaken. I'm pretty sure though that an OEM will definitely not be OK.

I couldn't live without Wine (or Crossover). I develop web apps for a small company, and Ubuntu Mate is my primary development environment. A lot of our software relies heavily on Word and Excel because that's what our customers use. And Wine does a superb job of integrating Word and Excel into the Ubuntu desktop. Hats off the the Wine developers for the amazing job they've done.

I'm primarily a Mac user rather than a Linux user. Occasionally there is an app I want to use that just doesn't have a macOS version, so I use WINE because then I can run it nearly-seamlessly. A Windows VM can't conveniently access my files, takes up 20GB of disk space, needs regular updating, takes time to boot and shut down, takes up more screen space than the app window itself, requires a license fee, needs its own 2GB of RAM, etc. If and when WINE works, it “just” runs the app for me.

> My assumption is that Linux users(myself included) that use Windows applications(not games), tend to just run a VM in seamless mode for Windows functionality.

Not really nowadays. The seamless mode tends to be broken so hard with Windows 10 guest in Virtualbox, and VMWare's seamless mode (Unity mode) on a Linux host is dropped a few years ago.

Most importantly, I don't want to run a full Windows VM in my low-powered laptop just to use KakaoTalk, the dominant messenger app in Korea.

> My assumption is that Linux users(myself included) that use Windows applications(not games), tend to just run a VM in seamless mode for Windows functionality.

No, the overhead of a VM is way too much for a single application. This is actually a disaster in the making.

I run mIRC on Wine.

I know, I know, there are plenty of Linux native IRC clients. In fact, mIRC has been quite stagnant lately. But to me, its UI is still unsurpassed (20 years of muscle memory also help), and it has less latency than alternatives (even with Wine).

I would never ever have guessed such use case.

Another proof that you never know how people will use your software.

Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I've been doing the same thing forever.

mIRC is the first client I ever used and I tried other ones (XChat, BitchX since running irc in a terminal sounded appealing, Konversation) and they just felt wrong so I stuck with mIRC.

It's been running perfectly in WINE since the late '90s.

I'm surprised that nobody's made an open source clone, since it's a long-standing app, apparently better than the available alternatives, and fundamentally IRC just isn't that hard.

They would do an Electron application.

I exclusively use Linux for work and personal use, and I only use Wine for games. It works surprisingly well, but sometimes requires some arcane tweaking (which you can google, thankfully). I can't see myself using Wine for anything else.

If you've got a tutorial for this I'd be interested (I really wanna run Sq8L on Linux in Renoise)

Hi! I really only use Wine for games. I wouldn't use Wine to run any other kind of software, but that might just be prejudice on my part.

I can't point you to an exact tutorial. I usually just google "[name of game] wine ubuntu how to" or occasionally "[name of game] [problem I'm experiencing] wine ubuntu" :) I suppose you could follow the same procedure to install arbitrary software.

Perfect timing.

Yesterday, I urgently needed to run a piece of software on one of my systems. I had two versions of that software on hand: One for linux and one for windows.

The linux version flat-out refused to run. In my desperation, I installed wine and (to my surprise and the surprise of my coworkers) the windows version ran flawlessly.

Granted, the specifics surrounding my situation was far from typical, but I wouldn't be surprised that the majority of wine usage is also atypical in one way or another. Measuring wine's relevance by your own (or my own) use cases will likely only lead to inaccurate conclusions.

I've heard some people use Wine to run VST plugins under Linux DAWs, because most professional audio plugins only support Mac or Windows unfortunately. Some (older) plugins are only available as 32-bit.

many of the applications for which you would want to run wine (e.g. gaming, the primary use) are performance-heavy. adding a layer of a vm is substantially more performance overhead.

That doesn't have to be true with hardware passthrough.

You still run Windows in VM. Some people switched to Linux to get away from that.

That is much more difficult, might require various unsupported hacks and for a truly robust solution you'd need two GPUs. For games having a Vulkan or DX12 (via DXVK) renderer, wine can be as fast as native Windows with almost none of the hassle. DOOM(2016) is a very good example.

Many games ban the players for using that setup.

Examples: Rust, Rainbow Six Siege, DayZ. All the games using BattlEye can be banned.

On the other hand LoL handles GPU passthrough well.

Canonical or other distros should have stats about the wine and 32bit lib downloads, I would like to see those numbers too.

Wine is an incredible peice of software. I tried it for the first time recently and I was deeply impressed. To the point I said to a friend “just write your apps Windows first and deploy with wine!”

Yeah - me too. As someone who's always needed Photoshop and Illustrator in my workflow I have tried to use wine on multiple occasions with no success. Never once was I able to get it configured to the point of usability/stability. VMware Workstation is the only thing that's ever scratched the itch.

I've always thought that Wine is just a compatibility layer for games and entertainment because actual professional software can't run on it without crashing every 30 minutes.

why not GIMP and Inkscape?

I find asking these kinds of questions to people using professional software like that is akin to asking a professional c++ programmer "why not lisp?".

Imagine you spend a career training on something and random people just tell you to do something else.

You spend a career training in skills, not training in specific tools.

If you limiting yourself to a single tool and refusing to learn anything else you are doing yourself a disservice.

The problem is that everyone has their favorite tools, and a barrage of "what about <X>" when you are in no mood to invest the significant time and effort on a standing start for <X> when you've got your existing toolset warmed up already.

> when you are in no mood to invest the significant time and effort on a standing start for <X> when you've got your existing toolset warmed up already

Sure, and on the contrary I've added Procreate on an iPad as my new illustration workflow because it absolutely kills vs. my old Photoshop/Wacom technique.

This isn't a "I'm not willing to try new tools/invest time into learning because I'm comfortable" thing... it's a GIMP/Inkscape are not capable thing.

Yeah - it's not about that. GIMP and Inkscape are incapable when it comes to professional graphics work.

Broken tools cost my client money.

You have the skill of writing messages. Why not do it with a hammer, chisel and rock?

When you have a dislike of someone's comment but can't quite put your finger on why, why not response with some absurd illogical extreme?

Err ... yeah - now you make it sound like I'm incapable of learning/trying new software.

Yes I've tried those alternative solutions and they don't have the same sort of polish and workflow as everything else. Find me ONE professional graphics designer who works 100% in GIMP and Inkscape - they just don't have the same feature set. If you do find people using GIMP and Inkscape in the professional world they almost always use them in conjunction with Adobe tools.

I have a specific list of needed features that do not have parity. "Doing something else" isn't an option when you don't have the tools to do your job/can't deliver for the customer because the software can't support what the printer needs...

In all reality I'm constantly adding new capability to my gfx workflow via software/hardware. I've switched completely over to Procreate on an iPad to do illustration. "Doing something else" is something I'm willing to do if it has value.

GIMP and Inkscape provide zero value to me - they're 100% neutered solutions/"toys" in the professional world. Open source folks (as much as I am one myself) want to think that there's a 1:1 tool for every piece of pro-level software out there and it's simply not the case =|

> Find me ONE professional graphics designer who works 100% in GIMP and Inkscape

My partner does, as do a number of studios and collectives I know in Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris and Porto. They use of course way more tools than Gimp and Inkscape, but work on Linux and exclusively with Free and Open Source software.

For them I feel it’s both about the philosophy, the challenge, and discovering new ways of working. Trying to reproduce an Adobe way of working will always feel lacking. Yet working in a free software ecosystem will make you also discover new tools (Latex, Graphviz etc.) and new ways of working (a lot of people are experimenting with doing print layout with HTML for example).

Of course sometimes it is painful--preparing for print production and especially spot colours without Adobe Acrobat is difficult and requires a a collaborative process with your printer. But it also comes with the thrill of trying a different creative model and the exchange with a small but thriving community of people who are excited about these things.

EDIT: This is not to say that it would be a viable approach for everyone. It’s just to say that such designers do exist, and to try to make their motivations more clear!

> It’s just to say that such designers do exist

Sure - somewhere they exist. But I have yet to run into one in my career. Real question: are they doing paid production work?

I just simply cannot fathom passing off the cost of using buggy/incomplete tooling to my customer so I'm curious if it's people just producing for the open source community using open source tools?

Not trying to rip on your statement, but that's the only reason I can fathom using these tools in any professional context.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is a legitimate question. Although my sibling comment might offer an explanation to your downvotes.

Edit: HN's really gone downhill. I thought we didn't downvote with feelings around here? All I did was point out that it's a legitimate question for people who don't have much experience with Photoshop, GIMP, etc.

They're miserable to use.

Sincerely, Person who has spent ~2-3x as much time in The Gimp as in Photoshop, and first learned image editing on Paint Shop Pro, not Photoshop, but would still choose PS if you told me to edit some images and my life depended on it, especially if I also couldn't use Google to look up how to do basic freakin' things.

i haven't thought about paint shop pro for a long time. fond memories. i might try and run that in wine.

Inkscape just released their 1.0alpha. You can argue about naming conventions all you want but here's the reality. It is just not a mature professional product in the same category as Illustrator.

Similarly GIMP has a lot of oddities that Adobe would have found unacceptable in Photoshop versions released 25 years ago. You can do real work in GIMP, but the polish just isn't there.

People downvote when they disagree - plain and simple.

If you're suggesting GIMP and Inkscape to someone coming from a pro-level career/background it shows complete ignorance on the topic.

Lots of the time I see this sort of brazen opensource can replace anything/everything attitude - it's simply not true + very idealist. It's likely a ton of pros who use graphics software are coming through and expressing similar thoughts through the downvote button... which in some ways is a "don't take this seriously" button.

Anywho - I agree that the parent comment shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question to ask if you have no experience in graphics.

I’m not the person you replied to but...

I use Inkscape and Gimp at work, very tiny minor part of a small part of my workflow.

Today Inkscape was crashing when I tried to rotate a spline with six nodes in an otherwise empty workspace.

I’m probably going to buy a commercial vector graphics app even though my employer won’t pay for it because that sort of bug is a show stopper right when I need the program most.

> Today Inkscape was crashing when I tried to rotate a spline with six nodes in an otherwise empty workspace.

Yep - similar experience with Inkscape. I mean - yeah it's fun and it's pretty capable but it's just really not capable of real work. It's a toy/open source "entry-level" piece of software.

Now imagine someone who needs to crank out 40 unique pieces of vector art within 4-5 days. There's NO WAY they can AFFORD to use Inkscape with those sort of stability issues.

> why not GIMP and Inkscape?

You might as well ask: why not use hobbyist tools with a subset of the features and a tiny fraction of development time and UX work, that basically nobody else in your industry uses?

In a professional setting you can't even think about replacing the established tools with the open source equivalents in the majority of scenarios.

They're incapable tools, plain and simple.

That's all I needed for an answer, I inadvertently annoyed a lot of people it seems!

Yeah - and for some reason you got downvoted into oblivion for what was a really really simple/valid question. Sorry on that one =(

Welcome to HN though - it's filled with really really smart people who want to be right about everything. If I'm being honest I'm one of them too ;)

Cheers!

A lot of people use computers that don't get reasonable performance with a Windows VM.

Since the release of Valve's proton fork wine has gained a massive amount of relevance. Since 2018 it is possible to play thousands of steam games that are windows only on linux.

I use Wine to run Adobe Digital Editions because the proprietary DRM is the only way to get library epub files onto my eReader.

It's very valuable to me for this use case, and AFAIK, there is no viable alternative on Linux (other than cracking the epub DRM, which I really don't want to do and risk giving publishers an argument against public libraries.)

15 years ago I considered switching to Linux. I depend on some Windows applications and, above all, I want to play games. Wine looked like it was almost there, so I intended to give it another try next year.

Year by year I've been trying Wine again and again. As of today, it's still almost there. So, maybe in 2030? By now, I'll stay using Windows.

For games, give Lutris a try.

For years, I've been reluctant to use Wine wrappers like PlayOnLinux, for no reason other than I don't like wrappers. I always ended up getting everything working with bare Wine, but at the cost of long hours (sometimes even days) of experiments.

I've started using Lutris a few months ago (I gave up on getting Wine and DXVK play well together) and, well, that's a life changing experience so far: everything works out of the box. I has taken all the fun out of Wine configuration for me ;)

Lutris looks cool, given steam using Proton or whatever it is called is there an advantage to using this today? Thanks for educating me!

If all your games are available in Steam, I see no advantage in using Lutris: in my experience, Proton works very well out of the box.

For games that aren't available in Steam, Proton is of little help AFAIK, and that's where Lutris shines.

Also, some people like having all their games in a single place, in which case Lutris may be a solution too, even for Steam games. As my “single place for games” is my shell, I usually skip Lutris and Steam GUIs to start games directly anyway, so…

You keep changing the goalpost. Odds are if you were willing to live with the versions you were using 15 years ago you would find Wine works just fine. Probably even if you just stuck with the versions you were using 5 years ago.

If someone wants to use Windows applications to interact with other users, using a 15-year-old version is really not going to cut it. Office, Photoshop... all of those big ticket Windows apps have added a lot of things in 15 years. You could get that level of compatibility from Libre Office and GIMP.

Actually no, I play DX9 games from 15 years ago and they are still, well, not there yet.

Some even earlier directx games are damn near unplayable anywhere but real hardware, last time I checked. Heavily tied to a handful of video cards from a span of just a few years. Looking at you, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. I don't think VirtualBox even works in those cases.

They don't even work well in Windows 7 or 10.

That's why I still have an XP partition

12 years ago I considered using Windows. I liked some Windows applications and, above all, I wanted to play games. Windows looked like it was almost there, so I intended to give it another try next year. Then Vista happened.

As of present day I am a happy Linux and Wine user and don't plan on switching to anything else.

I only use Wine indirectly, but I use it frequently because a ton of Steam games that run on Linux use Wine under the hood.

I just don't buy/play games that don't have a Linux version, as a VM was historically (maybe still?) too much hassle in terms of getting GPU to work, etc.

I use wine so that I don't have to spin up a VM for just one application. VMs also involve a lot of overhead. It seems a little silly to boot an entire OS and have that entire infrastructure just so I can use a Notepad++ plugin I wrote 5 years ago.

I still run LTSpice on Linux using Wine. That's about it though.

With the advent of WSL on Windows and my professional need to use both Linux and Windows, I don't have a lot of reasons to use Wine anymore, or desktop Linux for that matter. Windows + WSL is good enough, and better than the other way around of Linux + Wine or a VM. I fear Wine will become more and more irrelevant as time passes. Killing 32bit support doesn't help them any.

For work in Windows shop,sure, until I need Docker, although I could with faster I/O!

For home and companies that don't architect themselves around specific workstation OS, Linux all the way. I personally rarely use Wine, if ever, but had to use it for my kids requiring software that was available on Windows only.

I do a lot of varied development, some of it requiring visual studio.

WSL 2 supports Docker now.

Yes, and you need to run the Insiders edition of Windows, which is not a good idea to do on your main computer. Most people will expect until WSL2 is available in the standard Windows version.

Teamviewer (remote desktop software) on Linux uses Wine. At least it used to; haven't used it in a while.

It's native now (uses Qt):

https://community.teamviewer.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-Wait-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com