Is It Time to Serve The WINE?

An article on ZDNet asks about the viability of WINE, the application layer that allows ‘thousands of Windows applications’ to run in Linux.

Is revision level 1.0 ready? I don’t know. I haven’t tried a version of it for quite a while – so long that I don’t remember the revision level it was. I do know that there is a need for it, because, with the stability issues of Windows, any version, there are people who would like to have the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that things don’t crash in those mission critical applications. This is not to say that Windows hasn’t gotten much better, but there is still room for improvement. When the hardware is being hammered, and constantly near its limits, it is good to know that it will keep on chugging.

There is also that little matter of validation. You haven’t lived until you get the notice that your copy is illegal – while looking at the Microsoft hologram disc sitting less than 2 feet from the computer. It doesn’t happen often, but once is enough for most of us. XP is bad, Vista is worse, and ‘7’ – well, you see where this series is going. To my knowledge, no revision of Linux has ever put up a message box saying the user was in violation of the license, and no articles, messages, or notices have ever been issued to the fact that the operating system on that computer was going to be unusable after the year 2014.

I’ll be trying WINE, on top of OpenSuSE 11 soon, and hoping that WINE will be the salvation I’ve been looking for.  I hope it is what OS/2 was (no arguments here – I used it, saw it on many systems, and helped others set it up); a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows. If WINE allows Linux to be a better Windows than Windows, well, that will be something. It already allows the use of FreeDOS to be a better DOS than DOS.

Microsoft certainly thinks this is a problem -

Wine, not surprisingly, has been the target of anti-piracy campaigns by Microsoft. In 2005, Wine users were prevented under the Windows Genuine Advantage scheme from receiving Windows updates.

Fellow internet giant Google, however, has chosen to support the program, recently contributing cash to the open source project to ensure that Adobe’s Creative Suite software still runs on Linux systems.

That should be enough to show that the software is worth trying. Think about it. I see many people who have little to no interaction with the operating system of their computer, being happy to use the menus provided, never worrying about things like disc fragmentation, and only using antivirus software because they are told it is needed. Their biggest problem is when an application crashes, usually because the OS has let the system down.

If WINE works reasonably well – and by that I mean better than the current version of Windows – that will be a cost savings of thousands of dollars for even small businesses.

Open it up and let it breathe!

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