Why prefixes?

[WINOX]

Hello Guys,

I am wondering, why Wine works the way it does. The fact that Wine creates a new Windows environment for every user is something that always disturbed me. This makes integrating windows programs in a Linux environment hard. For this reason to me Wine still seems to be a stopgap and not something I really would want to use.

Am I the only one, who feels this way?

[pga256]

It isn't really a feature of Wine but more to do with the linux/Unix way of handling users. Each user gets their own /home folder by default and all of their apps/data go in there.

It would be possible to set up a folder on the machine which is accessible by members of the same group and put the wineprefixes in there. Users who need access to it would need to be added to the user group that has access to the folder.

There are many pages on the internet which show ways of setting up such folders and usergroups.

[WINOX]

Yes, but it's still just a workaround. I think wine should enable users to integrate Windows applications in their environment as close to how native apps work as possible. For instance applications should be installed to /user/share or /opt instead of /path_to_wineprefix/drive_c/Program Files/. IMO Wine should handle the C drive as some kind of overlay file system where "C:\Program Files" is /opt and C:\Windows" is /usr/share/wine or something like that. And as in Linux applications should generally be installed via the package management. Yes, I know without a fallback solution this would break a cupel of things like the normal windows installers and it may also be a big task to implement this (or not, I don't know) but imo it should be the way applications should work in Linux (even if the end with .exe).

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to complain about the work the wine developers do. I just want to discuss about it.

[sizeofbool]

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I am wondering, why Wine works the way it does.
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Also prefixes are needed to ensure maximum compatibility for programs used with wine. Some programs may work only in x86 environment, some others will want .NET4+ to be installed, etc.
Sure it uses a lot of disk space, but hopefully wine will get better in the future releases.