Wine Staging 2.15 released with more Direct3D 11 improvements

Quoting: LeopardBoth Wine and VM are beyond the level of average Joe. Average Joe should stick with dual booting.

But for a person capable of setting up Wine through different hacks in order to run something , setting up a VM shouldn't be that hard.

Also it is a one time pain , once you set it correctly you are ready to go.

Wine is pain every time.

While I wouldn't put Wine gaming in the same boat as accelerated vms, both cause it doesn't have to be hw supported and cause when it does work well with something it's really easy to setup even by first day migrants using PoL/Lutris and pleb-tier youtube guides, I agree it's not without a fair share of other drawbacks.

However your quote was in regards to Wine enabling and facilitating mainstream proselytism of users gaming on Windows out of necessity and as such I replied in accordance to this.

Most of the users being on the edge of switching to Linux for gaming are probably either linux users who still consider windows a better choice for their needs or half-techy windows users (ie /r/pcmasterrace) who have previously checked out linux but couldn't live without their games.

Regarding the ones that are somewhat tech-savvy, I'd expect most of them to hove already given it a chance. If it didn't change much then why would it now? It's not getting too much easier soon at this point.

To everyone commenting on the "Wine is a pain every time" part, Leo is most likely talking about configuring different prefixes for new games, not mointaining them.

Can't say I agree or disagree wholy with any school of thought on this.

Quoting: STiATGave up on wine quite a while ago. I have enough to play in Linux, and last time I tried wine was more of a hassle to get a game working at all than it was worth it. I even had to create several steam-wine-prefixes because games were getting in each others way.

It's much easier to use without Steam (DRM-free games). And I indeed make a separate prefix for each game, it makes things easier to manage, not harder. Something went wrong and you messed up your settings irreparably? Just blow away the whole prefix and reinstall. Which would be too painful, if you piled up all games into one prefix. Steam makes it complicated and too bloated, since you'd need to replicate it in each prefix I suppose.


Last edited by Shmerl on 24 August 2017 at 12:30 am UTC

What exactly is so hard about using WINE? It seems to me that, not too long ago I had to disable stuff in services.msc to for halfway decent performance without Windows getting in the way of itself.
That said, it would be nice to make wrappers instead of prefixes, like WINE on Mac does, so we can be sure a version upgrade won't break configuration.

Quoting: burningserenityThat said, it would be nice to make wrappers instead of prefixes, like WINE on Mac does, so we can be sure a version upgrade won't break configuration.

Developers can use Winelib already that way. It has a downside, you won't benefit from any performance improvements in newer Wine versions.

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: burningserenityThat said, it would be nice to make wrappers instead of prefixes, like WINE on Mac does, so we can be sure a version upgrade won't break configuration.

Developers can use Winelib already that way. It has a downside, you won't benefit from any performance improvements in newer Wine versions.

Yeah, there's always a trade-off. I wouldn't use it myself. So far, I don't know that I've truly seen a WINE regression, just a couple of instances where something else broke and it was easy to assume WINE was at fault... Much like people do Linux in general.

Quoting: Guesti use lutris mainly because it seems to work for me the best.playonlinux is a hit or miss and codeweavers which i paid for you will be lucky if you get games working right with that.apps im sure work great but that's not what i bought it for.so i just stick to mostly native linux games no headaches no issues.

I use Codeweavers' Crossover Linux myself and I am very happy with it, it is quite stable with new features enabled and a very good GUI. Been playing many games with it without problems.

QuoteI understand your Windows hate but sometimes Windows is a must.

It's a must when you want to have a look outside, but it's nowhere as useful as doors when you want to get out.

Dual booting, installing Linux, pretty much everything is beyond Average Joe.
So we need to talk about other people, with at least some technical expertese or willingness to read and try stuff.
And then wine or VM doesn't make a whole lot of difference in how hard it is.

Wine is very smooth for most games and a major pain with some. Not sure how much steam complicates things. I'm talking about GOG with a simple exe installer and with that it usually just works.

Here's one way to look at it. Dosbox allows me to play DOS era games. Wine allows me to play Windows XP era games. For that it works even better than modern Windows. It even allows me to play some newer Windows games!

Thanks to DOSBox I haven't needed DOS in the last 20 years. Thanks to Wine I haven't needed Windows in the last 10 years.

I'm running a Windows VM at work and it's a painful experience every time I must work with it. It takes too many resources to just run, that running anything inside it is really annoying. But because most of the customers of our company are using software, that can't be run in the wine, the VM is a necessary evil.

At home I'm playing mostly native games and testing some games on wine to fill AppDB data for the once I maintain.

Since there are several comments about the difficulties in setting up Wine prefixes, I'll just do a quick plug for my own little Wine management tool, Vineyard. With that installed, you can just double click a Windows executable, select which existing prefix to use or select "New prefix" (and if needed, select the Windows version to emulate, the virtual desktop size to use and which Winetricks packages to install) and click run; easy-peasy. It also comes with an indicator showing the running Wine applications (if they're launched through Vineyard) so you can check their output and it'll automatically suggest which Winetricks packages you might need to install based on the error messages.