When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Questions about Wine on Linux
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DrM1173
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When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by DrM1173 »

Wine is very suitable for running Windows games in Linux, but when using Wine to run (business) Windows applications like AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, etc. under Linux, you will often have problems with running these applications, because of incompatibilities between Windows applications and Wine's internal DLLs and components. Problems like crashing, graphical glitches, menu bars not displayed properly, etc. To avoid this, you have to resort to use Windows in virtual machines under Linux to run these Windows applications which do not run in Wine, virtual machines like Virtual Box, VMware Player, etc.

When will Wine reach a stage in which it will not have any major incompatibilities between Wine and Windows applications anymore and virtual machines become obsolete?
metcalsr
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by metcalsr »

It's functionally impossible for Wine to ever have perfect compatibility. That is an unreasonable expectation. Every time Microsoft releases a patch, their code base changes to some degree. The best we can hope is that the Linux market share eventually reaches a point that tools like Wine end up with massive development resources, but then again, at that point you'd end up seeing most of the software you want to work on wine being released with Linux native options in the first place.
invisible kid
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by invisible kid »

I agree.
jkfloris
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by jkfloris »

Valve (Steam) and CodeWeavers (Wine) are working together to make games work well on their Steam device (Linux). There isn't a company that does the same for other software.
madewokherd
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by madewokherd »

I agree that it's not realistic, but that's not because of updates to Windows. It's the complexity and scope of the Windows API, combined with the unimaginable volume of Windows software that exists. There are simply too many ways that a Windows program can accidentally depend on implementation details of Windows, which we did not happen to copy accurately to Wine. Often, this happens in a completely unique way that requires specific work from a developer on that particular program. Even if that only happens for a small percentage of software, the amount of software that's out there means that in absolute terms it's going to happen quite a lot.
DrM1173
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by DrM1173 »

While Windows 10 has a 'Wine' compatibility layer to run Linux programs in Windows 10, it is called 'Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)'. See 'What is the Windows Subsystem for Linux?'. It would be a great idea that Microsoft itself would also develop a Windows compatibility layer for running Windows applications without major problems in Linux, in stead of using Wine.
metcalsr
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Re: When will Wine have no major incompatibilities with Windows applications?

Post by metcalsr »

WSL works for a lot of things, just sadly none of the very specific programs I want to use it for.
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