Every computer should be able to run Ski Free, and Windows 9x versions of Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Hearts.
Every. Computer.
I use Wine on Arch Linux, and pretty much use it to play games, and occasionally the HP PC Connectivity Kit for my HP48G+ calculator (this program was built for Windows 95. I wonder if it'd even work on modern Windows with a USB serial device that I have... but with Wine, I just symlink /dev/ttyUSB0 to COM1: and I'm good).
It has a very high success rate for me, being able to run almost every game I throw at it flawlessly, both old and new.
I would guess that the number of Proton users is orders of magnitudes higher than the number of vanilla Wine users.
Just for proton work alone, Steam gained a lot of goodwill from me. And that is not to diminish Wine. There is clearly a need for a tool that has the ability to run custom verbose scripts, but Proton mostly solved the gaming piece.
I just use Wine, mostly with older games from GOG.com, and it seems to work alright in all but a few exceptional cases (and has for long before Valve got involved with Proton).
Source is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
Notice that includes a lot of git submodules; the big one is Wine, but it also includes forks of dependencies such as ffmpeg.
What proton is - its a tested distribution of wine and its libraries AND nice wrapper around wine, that helps setting everything up so it just works.
If you want to get games working on linux, proton is the easiest and best way to go. But if you want to get some of the programs running, that are not supported under proton, wine might work.
On the other hand, having that corporate support and isolation from the system sometimes cuts both ways: stock Proton often has worse support for audio and video codecs than a classic Wine install with the proper system libraries, because Valve actually has to worry about patents and licensing for them. They've come up with a system where the layer they otherwise use for sharing cached shaders can also share transcoded media files, but it's not always a seamless experience.
I think parent mean "fork" in the strict sense that there are two source codes "versions" of Wine: upstream, which is the official wine you get when doing `apt-get install wine`, `pacman -Ss wine` or whatever. Then there is Valves own clone of that same codebase, but with additional patches on top of it. Many changes are game specific, at least in the beginning, but many are also generalized and eventually "upstreamed" to the official Wine repository.
So in a way, they maintain their own fork with their own set of patches, and some of those patches makes their way to the "original" Wine while some don't.
Proton can only run Steam games, right? So Wine has its place for all other games.
But Proton can also be run outside of Steam.
SteamOS has the benefit of being basically entirely open and modifiable. Heck, it has KDE Plasma for its desktop mode.
I had heard it wasnt very reliable in the past, but haven't tried yabridge.
I only use steam to chat though
dxvk and vkd3d-proton are essential for it together with Wine.
Sometimes I think maybe I can run Office 365 on it, but I generally decide it's not worth screwing around with. I can totally get by fine with Evolution + EWS to connect to my Exchange server, and LibreOffice for editing documents.
> I just haven't found anything I like better than it
I can personally highly recommend Sublime Text. The clear downside is that it costs money and is proprietary (the free version is usable though, with a nag screen) but it's lightning fast (and as Notepad++ also handles huge files gracefully) and highly extensible (although the built-in features are way more than enough for text editor use).
> but how many of them are also telnet and serial terminal clients as well?
is "all of them", and they all support way more such things than PuTTY too. I think what you're used to (e.g. the GUI rather than command line switches) is the only thing that counts here, as PuTTY is inferior in almost every other way.
I mean SSH clients. Terminal emulators don't do SSH on their own either.
> PuTTY is inferior in almost every other way.
Not in any way that has ever mattered to me.
A terminal emulator is the interface through which you access programs like SSH clients and Telnet clients, much like a web browser is an interface through which you access videos, news, etc., so it doesn't make much sense to talk about what it does on its own - it exists to run other programs.
Technically, any program on Linux can access serial devices; even basic commands like cp and cat can talk usefully to serial devices for some simple purposes (e.g. short plotter drawings can just be sent to the serial port with cat, and my plotter will draw them - drawings bigger than the plotter's buffer need something a little more sophisticated).
PuTTY bundles together a terminal emulator, SSH client, and Telnet client. When you connect to something it's running the appropriate client in its terminal emulator. It's not an SSH client that supports Telnet, and its terminal emulator doesn't do SSH on its own (e.g. mintty is based on PuTTY's terminal emulator, without the SSH client).
Having a dev node serial device isn't very helpful in itself if you can't easily set the baud rate and other parameters when doing I/O.
Linux Desktop might be more popular if it didn't have such condescending advocates.
screen /dev/ttyS1 300
or
screen /dev/ttyS0 300,cs8
My cheatsheet: screen /dev/ttySX baud_rate,cs8|cs7,ixon|-ixon,ixoff|-ixoff,istrip|-istrip
But I am heavy screen/tmux user so its natural to me.
*I believe GTKTerm has GUI for setting that up
It is easy to set baud rate and other parameters with stty, but I'll stop trying to be helpful now.
Edit: Actually I apparently already knew this since the Linux laptop next to me has PuTTY native on it. I don't know why I had included it in my mental list of things I always install WINE for.
It works like a charm in Wine on Linux, but afaiu the maintainer (developer?) puts some effort to assure compatibility with Wine.
It's been working out nicely for many years, with only a few bumps and bruises in the early stages getting everything stable.
I've got some fixes in for wine. But debugging Wine can be quite a challenge, you need a lot of low level understanding.
Anyway, after focusing so much time and effort on the client-server apps, it is finally time to focus on a web front end (only 10 years or so late!). So I've written a middle-tier (running under Wine) with Nginx in front it. The middle tier translates JSON over HTTP->COM calls, then translates COM->JSON over HTTP on the way back. It's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, but it works and the approach has meant I can keep a tonne of existing code and keep adding features and improving existing features, which has been nice.
Back in the day, I used it to run Halo: Combat Evolved for PC on my Ubuntu installation. Now I have no need for this, but Wine improved over the years to a point where the game actually ran pretty well. Apparently the 1.0.10 patch for the game from 2014 now has a Gold rating on WineHQ.
If everything else fails, you can always try a full fledged Windows VM. Performance is... not like bare metal, but the results can be surprisingly good.
Also TurboTax.
I use it to occasionally strip DRM from epubs that I've bought.
- It takes around 1 minute to get auto-logged in. The macOS client takes 11 seconds (I just timed them both).
- About half of the UI doesn't work. Fonts are missing, so there are buttons with no labels. If you scroll with the mouse, sometimes that locks up the page you're looking at and you can no longer use that page until you quit and restart the app. You can do other things and come back, but that page is dead for you now until the next app restart.
- The Library screen works about 5% of the time. The other 95% of the time, it hangs during loading the page with the little Steam icon and the 3 dots under it. In order to play Portal 2 in those cases, I have to go to the store, search for it, click on it to go to its specific page, then click on the play button.
- One or all apps will sometimes (about 10% of the time) just abort with no error message or anything. The app window and the macOS process just go away. You might be in the middle of selecting a game in the Steam client, or you might be in the middle of a game (either alone or with a friend) and it just ends.
- When playing Portal 2 everything renders fine unless you're looking at it through a Portal. When looking through a Portal, random bits of geometry from around the level are displayed among the correct geometry, some textures are incorrect or missing while others are fine, etc. Just weird drawing problems. Once you pass through the portal, everything is fine.
- It mostly plays at 60fps, but very rarely (maybe 1% of the time) starts dropping frames. That part is fairly impressive, honestly.
So yeah, there seems to be some happy path for which it works fairly well, and anything off that is just random glitches, hangs, crashes, etc. I'm having a hard time understanding why the HN crowd thinks it's so great. This seems like the main use case, and others have claimed that Valve pays CodeWeavers (who make CrossOver) to make it work with their games, but it barely even works with the Steam client. I'm at a loss to explain it.
It works really well, considering what it is doing. I'm playing all sorts of games on Linux and my Steam Deck that I didn't even dream of being able to play before (including playing through Portal 2 on my Steam Deck currently :) ).
I'm not alone in this, you can browse a user-sourced DB of experiences over here if you want further proof: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular Everything rated gold or above runs really well and you don't experience any problems at all. Silver is mostly working ok, besides some edge-cases or aggressive anti-cheats stopping multiplayer from working.
I was impressed I could get Windows games running at all, but the experience was pretty bad as you mentioned. Titanfall 2 was real janky, no audio and the graphics were super bugged.
Plus with Steam on Linux you don't need to run the Windows version of Steam at all. The native client will let you install Windows games using Proton (Valve's modified Wine essentially) by checking a box. Most stuff works very well and it's how the Steam Deck does it's thing. Some titles actually work better than they do on modern Windows like Jedi Knight II which has 3D acceleration support on Linux through Wine but not Windows 10 native.
SRIM/TRIM (http://srim.org/)
u-blox u-center (https://www.u-blox.com/en/product/u-center)
various other vendor software (e.g. power supply control GUI over serial, etc.)- Foobar2000 (unfortiunatly very CPU heavy with audio problems, some incompatibilities)
- Subtitle Edit
- Advanced Renamer
- Faststone Viewer
All fairly ordinary tools but I didnt find suitable alternatives in all these years. Especially FB2K. Hope the Macos version will soon reach feature parity!
And FastStone Image Viewer is also familiar. :) Seems like I've turned lazy (and "cloudy") in recent years, Google Photos is just so convenient.
[0] https://www.navidrome.org/ [1] I'm using Subtracks on Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.subtracks
- Buttons to search for images with artist and album name
- complex renaming patterns
- replaygaining
- batch editing tags...
There is so much I love (ed) about it!
Haven't tried navidrome yet but was planning on installing a multiroom soundsystem with navidrom and snapcast. But that just serves a different purpise :-)
Bonus, the wine+msvc combination is still smaller than using a windows container.
Works fine, also for MSI file generation with Wix:
For years on macOS, I used (try) to run stuff on Wine 2.7, with not terrible success. Since then, Wine has progressed leaps and bounds, although I haven’t actively paid attention to most of its changes.
What do you all use Wine for (and on which OS)?
I used to keep trying it for running various poker clients on Linux but none ever really worked properly.
I also tried DelftShip (hull designer) on MacOS but couldn't get it to work properly, while an old version of FreeShip (from which DelftShip was forked) did however work IIRC.
In short I've tried various apps throughout the years but have found nothing that's actually worked well enough to keep it running to this day. Last time I tried Wine must've been around version 5 though, maybe things have improved since?