One I can think of right off the bat is gaming, especially old games that might never be ported to Linux (or, for that matter, remain compatible with newer versions of Windows). Also, for a while (before they DRM'd it) I ran the Reason DAW on a linux box. They didn't have windows 7 drivers for my MIDI keyboard at the time, but they did have Linux drivers somehow.

Ableton runs pretty well from wine too. Almost no messing around

bitwig has a native linux version.

I'd imagine the main issue is VSTs.

Some VSTs work flawlessly, others can be problematic and others do not work at all. You need to check them one by one, but surely a lot of them work. (edit): VSTs incompatibility doesn't just affect WINE but Windows itself from version to version. If you take a look at Reaper (reaper.fm), it has some options to run VSTs in various compatibility modes. This paired with WINE's ability to fake a different Windows version "emulation" should help with more problematic VSTs.

There are some VST bridge programs that use WINE underneath. I haven't actually used any yet so I can't attest to their usefulness.

https://github.com/abique/vst-bridge https://github.com/phantom-code/airwave

I don't actually use too many VSTs. I can generally make everything I need to make with the built in plug ins

I really want to start using bitwig (it seems like Ableton, but better), but I can't afford it. In all honesty, I'm using a cracked version of Ableton that I found man years ago, but I can't really find (or securely test) bitwig cracks.

I am on Mac OS and the Mac OS version of Minetest seems to have some view movement issues--maybe it's a touchpad issue with that version, I dunno. So I tried running the Windows version in Wine and it's completely solved the problem, the game seems to run great.

Old games for instance :) I love this game from the late 90s called Thief: the dark project from Looking Glass Studios. I don't think there is any way to run it properly on a modern computer without wine or virtualization (which would require a copy of Windows 98).

Actually, you can still play it on modern versions of Windows. Thank GoG for that :)

1. Buy Thief Gold from GoG ($9.99) [1].

2. Install this [2] community patch to downgrade it to The Dark Project.

3. Enjoy!

Always look for any old games on GoG first. If you can't find a game there, you'll definitely find it on either retro gaming forums or private torrent trackers.

[1]: https://www.gog.com/game/thief_gold

[2]: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140679

You can. At some point someone (probably one of the original devs) released anonymously a vastly updated version of the Dark Engine that Thief (and Thief 2 and System Shock 2) used that not only fixed any issues of the original but added several QoL improvements like antialiasing, raw mouse input, widescreen support, etc and since then he makes sporadic updates. Look for NewDark.

Sadly AFAIK he's still doing that anonymously through a french forum or something, probably because legally he shouldn't have the code. Despite that all modern re-releases of the games that used the Dark Engine (like those on Steam and GOG) are based on NewDark instead of the original engine.

I remember when the first NewDark patch dropped - the collective response of the community was "What the *?" (in the best way).

And even games not all that old. I'm currently replaying Fallout 3 (from 2008) just fine under Wine. It really is amazingly smooth -- almost as if it were a native game.

2008 is literally 9 years old, all the current day titles I look up are basically rated "Garbage". I think this will improve though as the move to Vulcan and DX12 should make porting easier as the APIs are more similar I believe. The most recent big name thing I could find was WoW - which, while originally from 2003(?) is actively updated and has had some pretty substantial graphical improvements in more recent expansions.

How could miss the top 10 platinum ? it is literally on the landing page of the Wine applications database[1]. It has left 4 dead, Team Fortress 2, Civilization 4, etc. More recent than World of Warcraft which is only rated gold. Then the Gold list has starcraft 2 (Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void), the sims 3, Final Fantasy XIV, Fallout 3,...

Though none of these are current day, they are not old games.

[1]: https://appdb.winehq.org/

Yeah, those games are about as old or older than FO3.

WoW at least has had a recent update (including a basically total graphics engine rewrite last year, switching to a deferred pipeline, etc) and still runs well - I'd call it more recent, but maybe that's just me.

The rumour is that Blizard has a sort-of-unofficial support for wine for some of their applications and they at least try not to break it on each update.

I ran No Man's Sky without problems. It's an OpenGL game so there are fewer incompatibility issues.

I'm running Skyrim (2011) flawlessly under wine (well as flawlessly as it run in windows at least), including expansions and mods.

The only issue is that on exit to desktop the game hangs and needs to be manually killed.

The new DX11-only re-release doesn't work though.

Just want to add that yeah, Thief is such a good game. If by chance the developers are reading this message board, thanks!

Tag&Rename [1], a still maintained Windows-only shareware excellent at tagging music. Occasional use, Linux equivalents suck in various ways, it's perfectly configured to my needs, and works perfectly in Wine so why change it :)

[1] http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

EDIT: thanks for the Linux alternative suggestions everyone! I have (had) mostly the same complaints about ExFalso / Puddletag / EasyTAG as the ones I posted below about Picard (never tried Beets though). But most importantly, given this olde windows tool has been working fantastic for years, I don't see any reason to migrate my config and trust and habits :)

Let the computer do the work, I recommend beets which pulls Musicbrainz data: http://beets.io/

Beets is great and it's the primary way I tag music, but it isn't very beginner friendly. Worth learning though.

For something much simpler I recommend EasyTAG: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG

>Let the computer do the work

I've had mixed success with this before when it comes to organizing media. Is there any app which takes the middle ground of doing the work but letting the user confirm?

Picard

mp3tag [1] works perfectly in Wine [2], does everything Tag&Rename does and is free. It also has a less cluttered interface in my opinion. :)

[1] http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

[2] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

+1. Responded to the grandparent to say that I mainly use Wine for mp3tag. It's the first donationware software I've ever donated to! I bought him some CDs off his Amazon wishlist. It felt great to give back.

Thanks for that. I've recently switched to Linux and while puddletag is a decent replacement, I've got nearly a decade of experience with mp3tag I've been loath to turn my back on.

What are the shortcomings you find in Picard?

Last time I tried (which may be old): performance, opaqueness in what the musicbrainz magic is supposed/about to do to my files, lack of features and UX conveniences making it impossible to reproduce my stupidly picky tagging / filenaming scheme :)

Since everyone is recommending alternatives: I'm using kid3 for that purpose, and it works for me just fine.

Have you tried puddletag[0]?

[0]: http://docs.puddletag.net

Have you tried Ex Falso for tagging?

The Witness.

I've heard that it is a magnificent game, but it is written with Direct3D 11, and although this Wine release notice states that "More Direct3D 10 and 11 features are implemented" and "Direct3D 11 feature levels are supported.", it doesn't seem to work yet (in "https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... they state that it didn't work a month ago with Wine 2.0-rc1).

I have both linux and macos, but no windows computer apart from the work one - and this particular game doesn't seem to work in a VM (https://steamcommunity.com/app/210970/discussions/0/45860751...), with Wine, or in any other way except a native Windows installation.

In any case, Wine is superb work so I can't complain (except for John Blow's commercial decision). At least I have the hope that I will eventually be able to play without the need to buy a dedicated computer!

Thanks Wine team!

Interesting fact is that The Witness is ported by Nvidia to run on Shield TV (which runs Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nvidia.the...

That's cool. Does that mean they ported the HLSL to OpenGL and what would be the obstacle stopping a Linux Port?

The game is available on PS4 and Xbox One, if you have one of those.

I use it to run esoteric windows-only software on my mac. For instance many ham radio programs are ancient and windows-only, many work fine in Wine.

Also I like to run HeidiSQL in Wine because there's not really an equivalent swiss-army-knife kind of tool that I've found that I like better.

I use HeidiSQL on Windows and Sequel Pro on Mac.

Usually my use case is connecting to either MSSQL or postgresql servers, but occasionally MySQL as well... I don't think Sequel Pro does anything other than MySQL, does it?

I use Wine on... Windows, to play some games.

Windows 8 and onwards seemly have some bugs in DirectX9 or less, and although seemly there is Microsoft employees trying to fix those bugs, those bugs are years old and still exist.

Some games when using Wine, work correctly... For example on my Win 8.1 laptop Wine dlls were the only way to play "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura" (without the dlls, the game would render half of the screen black, and the other half flickering like crazy).

There are patches for Arcanum that make it work better on recent windows versions including ones for widescreen monitors. With those I can play it fine in windows 10.

Interestingly enough Arcanum was unusable under wine on linux and MacOS for me (it ran at about 1/10 the proper speed), so I now run it under qemu on windows 10.

Playing Spelunky on my Macbook. No, really.

It's pretty killer for running older / less demanding games. Lots of older games work better in Wine than they do in modern Windows, if at all. Also, for some indie games with half-assed Mac ports I've found it's often better to just run the Windows version in Wine.

I suppose it works with productive Windows apps too...

Yes! I love playing Spelunky SD with my friend. I run it through Wine on Arch Linux and he's on Windows. It works flawlessly!

Hah, another Spelunky-er! That was the title that got me to first explore Wine.

I use it to run the 1Password app on Ubuntu.

I was considering of using it also. How good is it ? Are there any differences, restrictions ? Currently I use the 1password web version.

It's a bit of a slog:

(1) You have to get Wine working, which can be kind of a hassle - there are a million different guides and ways to configure Wine especially wnen you factor in 32-bit versus 64-bit, winetricks, staging versus devel, etc.

It's hard to sort through all the potential ways and figure out the simplest thing to do, which is basically:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

$ sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel

$ wine ~/Downloads/1Password-4.6.1.617.exe

<Now launch 1Password via the .desktop launcher that should have been created for you>

(2) The password helper won't automatically start, so you have to choose "Restart 1Password Helper" from the Help menu after you start the main application.

Then assuming you want to use the browser extensions,

(3) You have to disable browser signature verification under Help->Advanced (while you're at it you might as well "tune for performance").

(4) The browser extension shortcut keys won't work, so you have to click the extension button instead of simply hitting Ctrl-\.

hmm interesting. I never had to do any of Wine configuration on Ubuntu or Fedora.

1. sudo apt-get install wine 2. wine ~/Downloads/1passwod-blah.exec

On first launch wine configures itself and default configuration IMO works fine for running 1Password.

Last piece of puzzle is, making sure Password agent starts automatically when you login to dekstop so I have little .desktop file in ~/.config/autostart - https://gist.github.com/gnufied/c0615a8a90d21a8d575590b5001f...

How? It's a UWP app which Wine does not support.

I actually never saw the UWP app, it's been temporarily yanked:

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/71733/where-did...

I've been using 1Password 4, which works fine: https://app-updates.agilebits.com/download/OPW4

Unfortunately I can't seem to make the 1Password 6 beta (which may or may not be the UWP app? Unclear to me) work with Wine 2.0.

Ah. Unfortunately I have a subscription plan and 1Password 4 won't connect to it.

I see. Yeah only 1Password 6 works with the teams/subscription stuff and unfortunately they don't have any plans to support 1Password 6 on Linux (whether through Wine or other means):

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/2846/new-produc...

Yeah I use 1password as well. I wish there was a linux client.

I just started using enpass today. They have a native Linux app, it works almost identically to 1password, and you can import your 1password vault.

GNU has a password manager, though I've never tried it.

The old, still-supported version 4.x works great.

1Password is awesome on Linux using wine. I use it with Vivaldi (and the chrome plugin in Vivaldi). My other current use case is the original StarCraft. I just read (on the appdb) that the 32bit version of Lightroom now works with wine, so I'll try that too - soon. Now I am hoping for the "Affinity" tools (Designer, Photo), but they are still rated as "Garbage" in the appdb.

Anything in Adobe's Creative Suite.

Does Adobe's stuff run well? I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat if Premiere Pro performed adequately.

Can't speak for Premiere, but I have a really old copy of Photoshop (7.0) that I run on Wine and it has all of the features I need.

As long as you're not trying to collaborate with anyone, I've come around to The Gimp a bit lately for basic image manipulation w/ layers.

I did that for a while but then moved to doing things in command line imageMagick with 'eog' to see stuff. Then I moved to php imagick library as the command line tools were a bit 'high level' for what I needed to do.

Naturally I also moved away from Adobe vector editing tools to Inkscape and then to using vim to edit svg files.

Having discovered this 'convenient' way of working I am not enthused by the idea of installing some ppa to install Wine to install Adobe Creative Suite so I can get access to some version of Photoshop to then crack/hack it. Seems a lot of work to tweak the levels on an image.

Gaming is a big one too, but maybe less so now than in the past.

Honestly since Steam came over I haven't really had an issue gaming. Though I'm pretty much exclusively an RTS player, and I know those are easier to port; FPS/action gamers may have different needs from mine.

I use Wine for MP3Tag (best tag editor I've ever used) and foobar2000.

Audacious is an excellent, excellent music player/frontend for whatever GStreamer backend you're using, but it can't handle in_vgm for Genesis/Megadrive files, the PSF plugin, and the ADPCM plugin for playing back Gamecube sound files.

Foobar absorbed all of the collective years of development effort to make Winamp play everything under the sun. That is slowly trickling into the Linux streamers, but they're not all there yet.

Wine is also great for random C# applets that people develop, like a HydrogenAudio tool I use to compare waveforms of FLACs and MP3s to see if the FLAC is a true FLAC or just an already-low-pass-filtered-MP3 converted to a FLAC.

Notepad++ - I once tried a bunch of Linux tools for editing a large text file (GBs), but none of them was performant and usable like N++ with Wine. This was a couple years ago, maybe things have changed since.

For opening large files Sublime Text is my go-to editor. I haven't tried multiple GBs yet, but everything around 1Gb is going fine.

Evernote, sqlyog, MS Office (for compatibility or the more sophisticated functionality of Excel). Adobe stuff I run on virtualbox. I have to use Playonlinux and certain versions of the products to make everything work right.

Even with Play On Linux [1] I've found it a lot of hassle to try and run games through WINE.

For example I had a whole set of Tom Clancy games (Ghost Recon, Rainbow Five, etc.) running through WINE. Of course I noted how I got them running on the WINE Appdb. Then a couple of years later needed to reinstall - had upgraded OS, changed video card, etc. - and spent ages trying but ultimately failed. WINE's db had been cleaned and removed my reports, handy; and PoL just wouldn't work (possibly the APU??) despite reports to the contrary.

Sad, when ones knows these things can work. Even sadder with more modern games when the distributor/producers won't mess with WINE so the player doesn't have to.

tl;dr when PoL works it's great.

[1] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/

How is MS Office on Wine these days?

Some versions like Office XP won't work but Office 2003 does. Office 2013 will install using PlayonLinux but won't activate or update or load templates from the Internet.

Myself I find Libreoffice to be better than MS Office.

2007 runs perfectly and is all I need.

Still illegal I presume.

In what way would that have ever not been legal?

amazon kindle app, to get my books into calibre

Back before the demise of what.cd, I used Wine for Exact Audio Copy. As far as I know, there was still no "approved" cd ripper that would run natively on Linux.

I remember opening the thread shortly before WhatCD died. Whipper, a fork of Morituri had passed all the tests and was awaiting admin approval for at least 6 months.

What do you mean by "approved"? I've used cdparanoia for years, and abcde is quite a nice frontend for it.

WhatCD was a torrent tracker focusing on high quality and rare audio files. Your upload wouldn't be accepted if it wasn't made using an approved ripper.

Lots of professional software outside of software development is Windows-only. For a 3d hobbyist, lack of Photoshop and ZBrush makes Linux very hard to switch to.

Photoshop used to have a Unix (not Linux) version. A PITY that killed that (and didn't port it to Linux too).

I'm on a MacBook pro and use wine to play Skyrim. That was quite a wtf moment when I first got it working. Mods and all!

I spent one evening trying to figure out why it was extremely slow (1fps) and why there were some rendering artefacts. Then I found out I was running with nouveau instead of the proprietary nvidia drivers (this was a new OS install on a new machine). After switching drivers it run extremely well.

RegexBuddy

http://www.regexbuddy.com

I use it all the time (in macOS and Linux) for running MikroTik's[1] configuration tool (named "winbox.exe").

[1] http://www.mikrotik.com/

Where I work, the developers are /very/ Windows-centric, to the point where they can't port their C++ code.

So I use wine64 to run their command-line tools on FreeBSD, it works like a charm. :D

I'm using wine to play Hearthstone. Also briefly tried to run Ableton Life but I gave up and went dual boot instead. Otherwise Linux has everything available I need.

Others have mentioned games... plenty of those.

I have some minor apps I run like Zone Five Software's "Sports Tracks" (exercise logger), gaming helper utilities, etc.

Falcon 4.0 AF. Very accurate flight sim; it's old enough that you don't need a cooling tower plugged into your laptop to run smoothly.

I have the original falcon 4.0, still in a box. Love the game. How are those "expansions"? Worth it?

I tried a bunch of the various mods but they seemed pretty sophomoric and patchy... wasn't worth it for me but i guess yymv

Dolphin Smalltalk

GST user here! :hi:

Same as before: World of Warcraft and playing other windows game. Probably itunes for those with idevices.

Games

I rarely use Wine. But people use it for:

- Photoshop

- Accessing their DRM protected ebooks

iTunes, OCRing PDFs.

You can run it on Windows to run old applications.

Microsoft Office. /thread

Really, check out WPS Office on both Linux and Windows. It's a phenomenal MS-Office clone, 100x better than both OpenOffice and LibreOffice (because it actually acknowledges that MS-Office is a good piece of software).

I use Gnumeric and Abiword. I like the straightforward UI that doesn't try to be innovative or flashy and focuses on functionality. Do many people actually need a suite of several interconnected office apps? I just need to edit documents.

mspaint.exe

Why not use Pinta[0] on Linux?

[0]http://pinta-project.com/

Thanks for this! I was stuck fiddling in GIMP which is a bit too powerful for what I usually need it for

It's so faithful to Paint.NET, it's even written in C#.

I like the aesthetic of mspaint.exe.