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votes
Has Wine begun to remove the need for linux software?
I started using wine in about 2013 and I remember back then it was quite patchy and only worked on some programs/games. I used to have a rule that I stuck hard to that I would not buy any games that did not have a linux version. But now in 2019 I have found that everything I have tried to run in wine has been so seamless and close to flawless that I hardly know its running in wine. I semi regularly buy games that only have windows version because I am mostly sure it will work and can get a refund if it doesn't.
What does everyone else think about this?
I became more supportive of wine as a platform after reading Carmack's post about it some years back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_asks_why_wine_isnt_good_enough/c89sfto/
We're dealing with abstraction layers either way. I don't see a big difference if Linux is being targeted or translated to. There are some Steam games that even work better under Proton than their native Linux binary (eg. Risk of Rain).
I think Proton is a great middle ground for games - it doesn't take much to support it, and all the "porting" efforts are concentrated in 1 thing, rather than spread out across all the developers. I remember seeing the same Unity bugs in native Linux versions over and over all the time, and every developer had to struggle with the same problems while porting. Native versions are great, and I am glad a lot of new games support Linux, but it's a slow process, and Proton makes it easier, even if it slows its down a bit.
But your title says "software", and that's where we do need native versions, because things like Vegas, Solidworks and other important software doesn't work with Wine, and by the very nature of these applications they are harder to make work than simple games.
Wine is great for mainstream software, but I found that a lot of the less well-known programs and games often still don't work, or work in a very degraded manner. That's obviously because the mainstream gets more use and thus more people interested in contributing bug reports or fixes, but it's a little frustrating at times if that gem you love doesn't work.
As one example, Wine ran the StarCraft II Campaign flawlessly when I last tried it, but The Longest Journey had glitches (graphical and control-related) that made the game completely unplayable, even though the game is much simpler technology-wise.
The longest journey is so old it may just run inside a windows virtual machine if your computer is good enough.
Back in 2007 I had been forced to use Ubuntu for about three months before I went out of my way to get another copy of Windows XP installed. To cut a long story short, you should not listen to classmates who think they're hot shit at computers, because their advice might just nuke your copy of Windows.
As a young teen PC gamer in the mid-00s, my experience using Ubuntu was beyond terrible. Most games would not run at all either due to Wine compatibility issues or would run at single digit framerates because these games didn't support OpenGL.
On the only Windows game I got running to a fully playable state (WoW) there were some moderate caveats: You had to manually copy and paste the files from each installation CD and run the EXE copied from the first disc because trying to run the process from the CD as normal would fail. Some graphical options like Vsync and Triple Buffering were not supported. Unfortunately, these graphical options were only available in OpenGL for Mac users and even if you ran the game in OpenGL on Windows, they would be greyed out. If you tried to switch to a different workspace in GNOME with WoW open, your game window would disappear entirely.
Yet despite my atrocious experience of Ubuntu in 2007, I think my next gaming PC will be a Linux rig because support for gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds. Back in 2007, we didn't have Vulkan, dxvk, a native Linux client for Steam, a dedicated Steam operating system, native Linux games that weren't crappy FOSS knockoffs of existing games, and genuine support for Linux from big name publishers. Heck, in this time, Steam was still a slow, buggy and fugly pile of crap and wasn't the loved and respected digital distribution platform that everybody uses today.