2008/11/25 Foulkr <wineforum-user@xxxxxxxxxx>: > my thought is that the people that are complaining that the buttons and look of programs running in wine are the same ones that allow Microsoft to keep working on their GUI and not focusing on the kernel of their operating systems (anyone remember the talking paperclip in MSoffice?) They're worried about how pretty everythign is and not how it performs. hence the reason that Vista and xp never got rid of the infamous "blue-screen" error. hell when vista calls the screen in their error-logging a blue screen error. the only reason that wine currently exists is the lack of support from main stream distros building an operating version of their programs for linux operatiing systems (may be due to an abundance of distros) but if the people using linux started to use the open source versions available to everyone i.e. openoffice vs msoffice, kpdf vs adobe, etc... it would put a demand on the mainstream distros to start to adapt to at least the bigger distros for linux and provide support for the users running in a unix enviroment. Its all supply and demand, unfortunatly this time in reverse, they have the supply and we don't demand much of a change, we offer them our money instead of trying to force the change we want. For current software, the objection is that Wine doesn't let thingsstay exactly the same but with Unix underneath. How reasonable anobjection this is depends on the app - for example, the open-sourceequivalents of Photoshop or AutoCAD really aren't substitutes on thehigh-end professional level as far as the people working on that levelare concerned. Lack of good support for .NET 2.0 and apps compiled against recentVC++ is a reasonable problem to raise when the apps themselves areopen source! (e.g. AutoWikiBrowser, an open-source Wikipedia fasteditor which happens to be written against .NET 2.0). Wine's killer app in my experience is running old stuff. That onelittle Windows app that was keeping you running one Windows box justto use it - and you can't even *find* the developer any more, letalone ask them to do a Linux version. Wine runs those better andbetter. Often better than XP does, almost always better than Vistadoes. Microsoft would like to keep Windows a moving target, but they'rehampered by their own need for extensive backward compatibility (c.f.difficulty running old stuff in Vista or XP). So Wine can do bettercatching up incrementally than one might expect. At this stage I'm still more surprised when stuff doesn't Just Work inWine than when it does. Which is nice. - d.
