Another two weeks have gone by and the team hacking away on the compatibility layer Wine have a brand new development release available.
Need to know what Wine is? Here's a quick primer: it's a constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton. Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.
September 11 saw the release of Wine 5.17. The release highlights include:
- ADVAPI32 library converted to PE.
- Beginnings of an NDIS network driver.
- Still more restructuration of the console support.
They also noted 17 bug fixes. Solving issues either with this release or previously for: Deadlight: Director's Cut, Chrome / Chromium, World of Tanks, Risk II, Visual Studio 2019, Motocross Madness 2, The Sims Complete Collection and more. Full release notes here.
If you need help running multiple versions, Lutris is good for that. You can also get help in our Forum any time.
Quoting: AciDGetting more games to work is great, and I thank all the contributors to the Wine projet.
However I think the priorities needs to be redirected.
Instead of supporting all the newest games, Wine should focus on solving every single annoyance that _still_ keeps happening with the old versions of Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013. This should be Wine if not Codeweavers priority in my humble opinion.
If you want to convert enterprises to Linux, MSOffice is unfortunately a must-have, and therefore efforts should be made to make it run 100% flawlessly; ten years and MSO 2010 still has some rough edges that makes it sometimes unusable or very buggy, hence not usable in a professional environment (and MSO 2013 crashes pretty often or just does not work great).
I'm always stumped to see the latest AAA games runs at 120fps while the wildly more used office 2013 still can't do basic stuff without crashing/being unresponsive :(
tl;dr: Instead of improving some new games that will be use by a few number of users, Wine and Codeweavers should focus their effort on supporting apps that are wildly used in the professional world like MS Office, so that more user could switch over to Linux while still being able to continue working with the tools their company chose.
I think if you support new softwares only, in some years "all" will be supported but old things.
If you put work on old things, in some years you will have some recent softwares not supported, and very old things supported but nobody will use that anymore.
For example, in 5 years, MS-Office 2013 will have 12 years.
At this time, i prefer having all (or as much as possible) 5 years old software working trought wine than having Office 2013 Working, especially if you are considering that MS-Office is a must have, we can expect that features present in last version are a must have too ?
As for old softwares, you'd be surprised how many enterprises still runs old office versions today...just because:
- it works,
- it does not require a always-online account to use,
- they already bought it and it was not a subscription,
- Excel for instance did not add any major feature to Excel since 2010 (except the recent LET() function a few months ago, which is huge) (And between 2003 and 2010, only the addition of the table object was a pretty big feature...so not much, and not much that the average user will ever use anyway)
- and most of their employees only uses 10% of the software features and clearly does not need the latest thing.
Again, it's not about the age of a software, but about how many people are (still) using it.
Quoting: DebianUseri prefer having all (or as much as possible) 5 years old software working trought wine than having Office 2013 WorkingThe problem here is the definition of 'working'. Right now Excel 2003, 2013, and 2016 are 'working' under Wine, but with some major flaws for experts users. I'd prefer having an 12 years old Excel 2013 software that works like it is supposed to in all cases, than having all the 5yo softwares segfault on 10% of their features.
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