Well said austin. I'm a newbie to this site, but I am no stranger to forums (I'm a moderator on a Land Rover club forum), so I'm 'in tune' with the way forum users usually think. It means I can usually spot posts from users who are looking at things from a different direction (and often one that doesn't match the forum ethos) and so I am able to treat those post accordingly, sifting out the good info from the rest of the post. Complete newbies to forums don't have that skill and often take every word written in a post as aboslute unquesionable truth, and that can lead to confusion and misinformation, even though everyone who has contributed to a thread may have done so with the most honourable of intentions. I am interested in Wine for a number of reasons. I run a lot of legacy software (mostly Windows based) both at home and at work. I am now looking into ways of maintaining the ability to run that legacy software without the need to keep old hardware running, which is getting ever more difficult. So far I have been looking into Wine and virtual machines as options. At the moment thigns are not too difficult at home as I have a PC that I can boot into any one of five different versions of Windows if I need to, but it is now getting on a bit and is not up to running some of the more recent stuff I'd like to use, so I need to upgrade the machine. However, if I do I'll lose my current graphics card which has drivers for all versions of Windows from 3.11 onwards and end up with something that has just XP & Vista support. If I get to that level, I need another mean of running the older software I use as I find XP's compatibility modes a waste of space (most of the old software I use won't run regardless of the compatibility settings). The options I have are to run real copies of the old Windows OS's under virtual machines, or to run the applications directly under Wine which, I believe, makes a better job of 'being compatible' to older versions of software than XP or Vista. the fact that some of the software I run might well have native Linux version is irrelevant. I am very much a fan of MS Office 2000 & 2003. I can't stand Office 2007 so I won't be upgrading, and I find openoffice.org a very poor substitute which is probably closer to Office 95 in terms of usability and features. So, if I go the Linux route, I'll be running Office 2000 or 2003 under Wine even though the distro I choose will probably include openoffice.org as standard. If I go the Linux route with a new machine, it won't be because I want to use Linux and Linux apps instead of Windows & Windows apps, it will be because I want the ability to chose which bits of Linux and Windows I want to use together.
