The right distribution for running Wine?

[Zohan]

Sorry if I ask something that has been asked about a million times, but please honour the details of my question.

Question: Do you know a Linux distribution that is perfectly fit for running Wine?

I tried with Debian, and everything's perfect with Stretch, you just don't get the gstreamer toolchain working, because the 32bit versions conflict with the 64bit ones.

I tried with Archlinux, and everything's perfect until you start compiling the AUR libs (gstreamer, again, but you need them for 64bit, too). There are so many of them plugins, and not few of them fail in the process of compiling. (Not such a big surprise if you pull all the sources frehsly from the git repos.)

Most of the smaller distributions I tried in the past weren't able to supply all the runtime 32bit libs wine32 needs, that means, it wouldn't even start.

I doubt it's a good idea to pick a Linux distribution for its ability to run Wine, but I'd like to get it running perfectly, once in my life time. Any hints?

[Bob Wya]

...

I doubt it's a good idea to pick a Linux distribution for its ability to run Wine, but I'd like to get it running perfectly, once in my life time. Any hints?

Gentoo's pretty good for running Wine (in my own humble opinion, heh, heh).
Gentoo does have very good multilib support (and yes - you can build all of Wine's dependant gstreamer packages as multilib).

Arch is OK as well, you may just need to fix some of the AUR packages (not nearly as good a "source-based" experience as Gentoo, AUR breakage is way too common).
Then you've also got the option of building Github: Tk-Glitch/PKGBUILDS's custom patched Wine version...
Arch's mingw support is very good. Making it easy to build customised standalone versions of: dxvk, d9vk, faudio, gallium 9, etc.

For binary distributions probably OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and/or Fedora, will also give a pretty decent experience.
At least the Wine packages, for these distributions, are not months out-of-date (like the stock Debian/ Ubuntu packages tend to be).

Just my personal $0.02.

Bob

[Zohan]

...

Gentoo's pretty good for running Wine (in my own humble opinion, heh, heh).
Gentoo does have very good multilib support (and yes - you can build all of Wine's dependant gstreamer packages as multilib).

I just gave it a try. I must say, just a few tests considered, but Wine looks good, very good.

The cons are: I have never had a flawlessly running Gentoo system. In today's case, when the screenlocker sets in, it's all over because it seems to have some trouble transmitting user credentials, so unlocking always fails. You need to kill your session and start over. Actually, in my experience, there's always something broken with a Gentoo system. Trying to find the reason behind the breakage usually lasts longer than the package maintainer's next update (which fixes it too), so you usually better lean back and wait.

Arch is OK as well, you may just need to fix some of the AUR packages

I mean, you can complain to nobody if a fresh git pull doesn't compile, not to mention a dozen. There's nothing to fix but the AUR package's author.

Thing is, I don't want to dedicate my life on repairing the system, it should simply work to some degree, I think. So I guess it should rather be a binary distribution.

Which gets us to Fedora. For meanwhile about 4 years, Fedora freezes on my system. (Today, I tried it again, to the same effect.) It doesn't really matter if X11 runs, but after a few minutes, it's freezing time. I don't get that far that I'd be able to test Wine. Them Redhat guys really like to patch their kernels thoroughly. (In contrast, CentOS kernel works, but the userland is partially stone-aged.)

My experiences with OpenSUSE are older than 6 years, but AFAIR, Wine support wasn't that glorious (Wine updates rare and often half-broken, recompilation impossible because of incomplete lib32 packages), but I'd like to hear more promising experiences.

Yes I sound like a whining noob.

[Cybermax]

Yes I sound like a whining noob.

Nah. Each distro has its own fuckups tbh, and there is no such thing as a "perfect distro".

I guess Gentoo being the most barebone source-based-compile-yourself distro has the possibility of becoming "perfect" if you are willing to dedicate your life and all your efforts in doing so. Most ppl are not tho.

I have had Gentoo running a few years back, but soon got tired of having to do a "world" recompile if i changed something, even tho it would probably be a lot faster today than when i tested it.. so i can really only speak of Ubuntu that i am using.

Ubuntu works pretty well imo out-of-the-box, but multilib compile (like wine) sux balls, cos you have to jump through a few hoops to get that working. Once you have set up a working compile env, i have little problems with compiling wine. I like to use lxc for crosscompiling wine and building deb's, but there are probably easier methods. One other thing i do like is launchpad (or even OBS) to build packages vs. installing source directly. That way you have some kind of control of what you install, but the package versioning can be a wee bit of a step to get used to.

Pro's:
Mostly a "ready" system with default packages.
After a slight learning curve, you can make your own packages without horrible problems. It is doable to "backport" packages from debian testing -> your Ubuntu distro
Quite a bit of enthusiasts make their custom packages (including me) on launchpad for easy binary install.

Con's:
Slow update of new packages. Old packages exists for "years".
Bad multilib support for crosscompiling amd64/i386 (No clue about other arch's)

[dimesio]

My experiences with OpenSUSE are older than 6 years, but AFAIR, Wine support wasn't that glorious (Wine updates rare and often half-broken, recompilation impossible because of incomplete lib32 packages), but I'd like to hear more promising experiences.

I've been using openSUSE for 11 years, and that's not been my experience at all. New development and staging packages are built every two weeks, I've never encountered a "half-broken" one, and the 32 bit baselibs packages needed to run Wine are readily available on the OBS.

[Zohan]

I've been using openSUSE for 11 years, and that's not been my experience at all. New development and staging packages are built every two weeks, I've never encountered a "half-broken" one, and the 32 bit baselibs packages needed to run Wine are readily available on the OBS.

Sorry I didn't mean to insult OpenSUSE users, I just remembered some struggles while compiling some 32bit applications, I guess there's still an open ticket of mine.

Anyway, I got my Gentoo flying now, I am happy.

Thank you!