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

How Wine works 101

werat.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 188 posts

Re: How Wine works 101

#41

Post by tmccrary55 »

pizza234 wrote: post #19
gerdesj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition). MS are currently hell bent on getting you onto a cloud subscription for Windows as a service (WAAS) because that is their current business model. The Wine project is hell bent on delivering functionality that you want and they think you might want. Wine is less about shuffling the start menu to the middle of the taskbar…

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

historically

You're not wrong but we're in a whole new game these days.

Re: How Wine works 101

#42

Post by monocasa »

pizza234 wrote: post #19
gerdesj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition). MS are currently hell bent on getting you onto a cloud subscription for Windows as a service (WAAS) because that is their current business model. The Wine project is hell bent on delivering functionality that you want and they think you might want. Wine is less about shuffling the start menu to the middle of the taskbar…

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

'Recently' meaning about the past 10 years or so. Windows 8 broke a lot of software for me that runs in Wine.

Re: How Wine works 101

#44

Post by Maursault »

keithnz wrote: post #32
haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

what old windows programs from Vista/XP/2000 can't you run on Windows 11? It has "compatibility mode", just select properties on the program and select compatibility, and select the OS you want.

Will old NT4 drivers work in Win11 compatibility mode? In another life I was a prepress operator. The RIP software only reliably ran on Windows NT4 on Alpha... can almost remember the... ah, yes, AGFA Apogee. Hardware replacement problems like this[1] were not uncommon (wow 2008! I was out of commercial printing by 2001.) But with NT4 on Alpha, once the software was installed, it never needed rebooted; it would just run until it died. Almost never hear about crazy uptimes with Windows, but, of course, RIPs only do one thing, but a lot of one thing.

[1] https://printplanet.com/threads/can-apogee-works-on-windows-...

Re: How Wine works 101

#46

Post by emptyparadise »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #10
userbinator wrote: post #7

tl;dr: WINE can be considered to be more like an API translator. The opposite is also possible (Linux binaries on Windows), the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself, but there were a few other attempts before that: http://cowlark.com/lbw/index.html is one example I just found. ...and as an aside, the comments about the alcoholic beverage really suggest that they should've kept it named WINE (all upperc…

> the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself Worth noting that this only applies to WSL1; WSL2 works in a completely different way.

Still a bit sad that Microsoft went the hypervisor way with WSL2, rather than the Windows Subsystem way in WSL1. It makes perfect sense that they did, but I'm still a bit sad.

Re: How Wine works 101

#47

Post by anyfoo »

gerdesj wrote: post #31
pizza234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

Linux will shortly remove support for DECNet. That's deprecating something responsibly. Your SimCity example was an easy win and yet more wankery. They have not put a huge amount of work in compatibility. MS have done just enough always and only enough. That is precisely what a large commercial business would do and they did.

I'm saying this as someone who does not care about Windows (or Microsoft) at all, and hasn't been using Windows besides maybe in a vm once a year for at least a decade now:

To say they have done "just enough always and only enough" is massively underselling it to a level where it's basically wrong.

Everyone who has been following Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog for some time knows the massive, quite impressive, and at times even "unreasonable" seeming work to keep things compatible. Especially, but not exclusively, in the Windows 95 days. Quite possibly that has changed in the last few years or even decade (I wouldn't know), but at least the claim that they never put a huge amount of work into compatibility is just not true.

Here is just one of many articles that outlines some insanity that Windows did for compatibility, stuff where other OSes (including Linux, at least outside of the kernel) would have rightfully said that this software needs to be fixed instead: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160404-00/?p=93... - I found this one randomly after a cursory search, there were other articles that may prove the point even more.

Raymond Chen did also state that the more things shifted to be "online", the more reasonable it became to let vendors fix issues with patches (often with MS's guidance) instead of doing insane tricks in the OS, but still: Credit where credit is due.

Re: How Wine works 101

#48

Post by FrobeniusTwist »

thomasahle wrote: post #27
gerdesj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition). MS are currently hell bent on getting you onto a cloud subscription for Windows as a service (WAAS) because that is their current business model. The Wine project is hell bent on delivering functionality that you want and they think you might want. Wine is less about shuffling the start menu to the middle of the taskbar…

> MS are profit motivated (by definition) Not by definition, but by "Dodge v. Ford Motor Co." [1] the Michigan Supreme Court case that held "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co .

That case probably (it's been a while since I checked) still shows up in most business law casebooks, but it doesn't really help much in understanding modern judicial thinking about the role of "profit motivation" in corporate decision-making.

Here's the abstract from a fairly recent paper in the principal journal of the ABA's Business Law Section in which the case and its relevance today was discussed in detail:

  This article examines Dodge v. Ford on its 100th anniversary. In Dodge v. Ford,
  the Michigan Supreme Court held that a business corporation is organized for
  the profit of its shareholders, and the directors must operate it in service to
  that end. Despite the fact that Dodge v. Ford is rarely cited in judicial
  opinions, the case continues to spark controversy in legal scholarship. There
  is little justification for this scholarly attention because the factual basis
  is little more than a caricature of Henry Ford, and subsequent developments in
  corporate law have all but eviscerated the precedential value of the case.
  Rather, the legacy of Dodge v. Ford may simply be that it serves as a
  convenient talisman, standing for the one sentence anyone actually cares about
  and rolled out with each new battle in the war between shareholder profit
  maximization and corporate social responsibility.
Michael J. Vargas, Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. at 100: The Enduring Legacy of Corporate Law’s Most Controversial Case, The Business Lawyer, Vol. 75, p. 2103 (2020).

Re: How Wine works 101

#49

Post by kelnos »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #37
metadat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning jldugger: Despite the topic being a prime candidate for a joke, it's a tough crowd in this thread.

I think the joke is good here, because the title is ridiculously ambiguous, and a technical article about how wine is made would suit HN as much as one about WINE. But when people try hard to make a pun that isn't so good.

I look at it the other way: with the title worded and capitalized as it is, the joke is so obvious that I just can't find it funny at all. Immediate eye-roll and downvote from me when I clicked on the comments and saw that the top comment (at the time, at least) was a joke.

Heh, I just reloaded the page, and it looks like that comment wasn't even a joke after all! The commenter did not read the article, but honestly believed it was about the alcoholic beverage, and has since updated the comment to reflect that.

This is the other thing about this, too: sometimes it's hard to distinguish a joke for someone actually just making a mistake.

Re: How Wine works 101

#50

Post by stephen_g »

haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

One big thing for games is that Microsoft swapped out older DirectX libraries to be fairly poor emulations/translations instead of being handled directly by the graphics card.

You can get better translation/emulation libraries that you can swap in to an application, like dgVoodo2 that can improve things hugely (but unfortunately buggy with some games). I think Wine's translation is also much better than Microsoft's for these older DX versions.

Post reply on HN