Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wine 5.0

winehq.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Wine 5.0

#21

Post by driminicus »

ziotom78 wrote: post #3

Let's hope that «multi-monitor support» will help this bug [1] go away! I have found that most of the Windows apps I used to rely on have good counterparts working on Linux, but sadly nothing matches Powerpoint (no, LibreOffice does not count). [1] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7416

Onlyoffice is getting there, but it is still missing a few features, such as animations.

Re: Wine 5.0

#22

Post by sgz »

swiley wrote: post #5
ziotom78 wrote: post #3

Let's hope that «multi-monitor support» will help this bug [1] go away! I have found that most of the Windows apps I used to rely on have good counterparts working on Linux, but sadly nothing matches Powerpoint (no, LibreOffice does not count). [1] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7416

What exactly makes PowerPoint so good? I’ve never really used either, I’ve mostly relied on pamdoc’s Beamer generator and google slides.

I try to avoid using MS products (not hate, just trying to favour free software), but I had to learn extensively about Office last year and I really enjoyed the UX. It has some powerful features for working with animations, transitions and effects. Take this example [1] -I don’t think it’s even possible to do in Google Slides, which finds its power by being more simple and multiplatform. So it depends on your needs, which also applies to Beamer.

[1]: https://youtu.be/3wtwVE5injI

Re: Wine 5.0

#23

Post by Yetanfou »

Dayshine wrote: post #13

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH? It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine. I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now does cloudy things. Since I just want to run the thing off-line without any external interference I prefer the 2016 version over newer incarnations. On Windows I'd have to try to eradicate every last trace of Sketchup from the registry and any other location used to determine whether this is the first time the program has been installed. On Linux the solution is simple, just wipe $WINEPREFIX and re-install (an automated process) to the same location. A simple script does the job, sketchup -r and I'm set.

By the way, $WINEPREFIX can also be used to make sure you don't wreck your entire Wine setup with a single typo. Just make sure all your serious use of Wine is done with a specific, non-default prefix and you're set.

Re: Wine 5.0

#24

Post by simion314 »

Dayshine wrote: post #13

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH? It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine. I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

Use PlayOnLinux as a GUI for managing different prefixes but don't use the built-in install scripts , there are GUI configs but you can also open with a button a terminal in the correct prefix and type commands there if needed.

You may still need prefixes because for game A the wine direct3d will work better but for game B you may want DXVK and if you want to mod Skyrim you will have to compile a patched wine version,

POL will also manage all versions of wine for you so it can grab the latest one if you need it or some very old one if some game/application needs that.

I read about a month ago about hat the dev of DXVK had tons of issues where small patches to fix X issue were breaking Y issue and it made no sense, so is a impossible job to be 100% compatible with all games and application bugs.

Re: Wine 5.0

#25

Post by ubercow13 »

Dayshine wrote: post #13

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH? It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine. I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

You can use pywinery for (more lightweight) profile management

https://github.com/ergoithz/pywinery

Re: Wine 5.0

#28

Post by mkup »

Yetanfou wrote: post #23
Dayshine wrote: post #13

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH? It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine. I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now doe…

"now does cloudy things" has really made my day, thanks. Unfortunately, a lot of modern software does cloudy things, Windows 10 and MS Office included.

Re: Wine 5.0

#29

Post by jeroenhd »

Yetanfou wrote: post #23
Dayshine wrote: post #13

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH? It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine. I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now doe…

There's applications to do this on Windows too. Using Sandboxie you can create a sandbox on the file system to isolate files (for sketchup for example) in the same way you can use a Wine prefix to isolate a single application.

Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.

Post reply on HN