How to phrase Wine's success rate
When making announcements about Wine 1.0, it's useful to include an objective measure of how well it works for the average app, one that correctly conveys both Wine's promise and its limitations. Our current appdb stats are: Platinum 1500 Gold 1763 Silver 1194 Bronze 1071 Garbage 2512 That's 19% platinum and 41% gold-or-platinum. (Given rating inflation, we probably shouldn't claim that silver or below means "working" for the average person.) How about: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches." That assumes we don't have too many regressions. It'd be nice if the appdb could give finer grained summaries, e.g. counts of apps that had actually been tested with wine-1.0rc*. - Dan
When making announcements about Wine 1.0, it's useful to include an objective measure of how well it works for the average app, one that correctly conveys both Wine's promise and its limitations.
Our current appdb stats are:
Platinum 1500 Gold 1763 Silver 1194 Bronze 1071 Garbage 2512
That's 19% platinum and 41% gold-or-platinum. (Given rating inflation, we probably shouldn't claim that silver or below means "working" for the average person.)
How about: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
That assumes we don't have too many regressions. It'd be nice if the appdb could give finer grained summaries, e.g. counts of apps that had actually been tested with wine-1.0rc*. - Dan
Great idea! Should be easy to do once the filtering system is in place. I'm not sure when it will be applied to the appdb source, though. Alexander N. Sørnes
"Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
Just my opinion, but that's a terrible idea to put in the 1.0 announcement. The impression I get after reading this is (1) wine is full of glitches, and (2) it's being released with 80% of the apps not working well. If you're trying to appeal to new users and/or sponsors you should put more focus on the positives. I don't see Fedora saying "Release features include X, Y and Z, but X has a bunch of bugs" (X might be full of bugs, but you don't point this out in your release announcement ). Ivan
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg231(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
Just my opinion, but that's a terrible idea to put in the 1.0 announcement. The impression I get after reading this is (1) wine is full of glitches, and (2) it's being released with 80% of the apps not working well.
But if we aren't realistic, we'll get lots of blowback saying "Wine is full of glitches, and most things I try don't work! Wine is crap!" Better that they know the limitations ahead of time. How about this for more positive yet realistic phrasing: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about half work well enough to try, and of those, half work well enough to use routinely. In particular, Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and many small apps run very well. .NET based apps and Photoshop CS3 are not yet supported."
If you're trying to appeal to new users and/or sponsors you should put more focus on the positives. I don't see Fedora saying "Release features include X, Y and Z, but X has a bunch of bugs"
That's because Fedora largely works far better than Wine does. - Dan
How about this for more positive yet realistic phrasing: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about half work well enough to try, and of those, half work well enough to use routinely. In particular, Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and many small apps run very well. .NET based apps and Photoshop CS3 are not yet supported."
That just sounds more confusing... Is "percent of apps we tested" a formal release criterion for Wine 1.0 ? If not, the stats seem irrelevant as far as this release is concerned. If yes, why release with so many apps not working well ? If you want to set realistic expectations - list major supported apps along with a link to appdb called "Will my app work under WINE?". Then the users will have a realistic expectation of whether their individual apps work. Setting realistic expectations with a rather low percentage number just means a lot of people won't even bother trying. Ivan
On 5/25/08, Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg231(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How about this for more positive yet realistic phrasing: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about half work well enough to try, and of those, half work well enough to use routinely. In particular, Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and many small apps run very well. .NET based apps and Photoshop CS3 are not yet supported."
That just sounds more confusing...
Is "percent of apps we tested" a formal release criterion for Wine 1.0 ?
No.
If not, the stats seem irrelevant as far as this release is concerned.
Here's how it's relevant: if we just say "Wine 1.0 is great! Try it!", people will try it, find it doesn't work for three quarters of their apps, and conclude that Wine sucks. We want to avoid that by owning the issue, and informing people in advance that not all apps work.
If you want to set realistic expectations - list major supported apps along with a link to appdb called "Will my app work under WINE?". Then the users will have a realistic expectation of whether their individual apps work.
The appdb does not have complete or accurate information, and lots of people won't even bother to find their app in it. While we should indeed link to it, we should also give people an overall idea of how well Wine works.
Setting realistic expectations with a rather low percentage number just means a lot of people won't even bother trying.
Better that than they try it and conclude that it sucks. One more try: "Wine 1.0 runs apps like Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and a thousand other apps (see http://appdb.winehq.org) well. Try it on your favorite app and see if it works for you; the smaller the app, the more likely it is to work well. Photoshop CS3 and .NET applications are not yet supported. Wine is continually improving, and many apps that didn't work well last year work well now. Overall, about one in four apps tested work well as of Wine 1.0. See the Wine FAQ (http://wiki.winehq.org) for more info." - Dan
On Sunday 25 May 2008 20:41:51 Dan Kegel wrote:
One more try: "Wine 1.0 runs apps like Photoshop CS2, World of Warcraft, Firefox 2, and a thousand other apps (see http://appdb.winehq.org) well. Try it on your favorite app and see if it works for you; the smaller the app, the more likely it is to work well. Photoshop CS3 and .NET applications are not yet supported. Wine is continually improving, and many apps that didn't work well last year work well now. Overall, about one in four apps tested work well as of Wine 1.0. See the Wine FAQ (http://wiki.winehq.org) for more info."
I think games are important to mention explicitly at least once. Therefore (+ a bit of restructuring): "Wine 1.0 runs thousands of applications and games well, among them Photoshop CS2 and World of Warcraft. To find out if your favorite applications work, try them on Wine yourself or consult our application database under http://appdb.winehq.org. While some complex applications such as Photoshop CS3 and software written with .NET are not supported yet, you will find that many simple applications will work. In addition, Wine is continually improving and we expect to support even more applications in the future. Overall, about one in four tested applications work well as of Wine 1.0. See the Wine FAQ (http://wiki.winehq.org) for more info." -- Markus
Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
"Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
Just my opinion, but that's a terrible idea to put in the 1.0 announcement. The impression I get after reading this is (1) wine is full of glitches, and (2) it's being released with 80% of the apps not working well.
Number of apps working is a bad measure anyway - who cares if 99% of applications don't work if users only want the one that actually does? This is in Wine's favor, as we've prioritized work on popular applications, both intentionally through developer efforts and also accidentally through receiving more bug reports. Thanks, Scott Ritchie
Is there somewhere a graph showing the evolution of the appdb stats over time ? -Leszek Le dimanche 25 mai 2008 à 03:28 -0700, Dan Kegel a écrit :
When making announcements about Wine 1.0, it's useful to include an objective measure of how well it works for the average app, one that correctly conveys both Wine's promise and its limitations.
Our current appdb stats are:
Platinum 1500 Gold 1763 Silver 1194 Bronze 1071 Garbage 2512
That's 19% platinum and 41% gold-or-platinum. (Given rating inflation, we probably shouldn't claim that silver or below means "working" for the average person.)
How about: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
That assumes we don't have too many regressions. It'd be nice if the appdb could give finer grained summaries, e.g. counts of apps that had actually been tested with wine-1.0rc*. - Dan
While I'd like to stay positive, this report assumes that all users who have an application that doesn't work immediately run out and report it to the AppDB as garbage (and while I know the same is true for apps that do work, I'd assume its a much higher proportion of the the former). On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 03:28 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
When making announcements about Wine 1.0, it's useful to include an objective measure of how well it works for the average app, one that correctly conveys both Wine's promise and its limitations.
Our current appdb stats are:
Platinum 1500 Gold 1763 Silver 1194 Bronze 1071 Garbage 2512
That's 19% platinum and 41% gold-or-platinum. (Given rating inflation, we probably shouldn't claim that silver or below means "working" for the average person.)
How about: "Of the apps we have tested with Wine, about 20% work well, and about another 20% work but have some glitches."
That assumes we don't have too many regressions. It'd be nice if the appdb could give finer grained summaries, e.g. counts of apps that had actually been tested with wine-1.0rc*. - Dan
Dan Kegel <dank <at> kegel.com> writes:
When making announcements about Wine 1.0, it's useful to include an objective measure of how well it works for the average app, one that correctly conveys both Wine's promise and its limitations.
Our current appdb stats are:
Platinum 1500 Gold 1763 Silver 1194 Bronze 1071 Garbage 2512
I think it's important to add a note for the user that wine needs a bunch of tweaking.
From the garbage test-results that come in in the appdb, many can be solved so easily (missing mfc42, msvcp60 and lots of other add-on dlls. Also, since wine started to have it's own gdiplus and d3dx9* dlls, lots of crashes because of unimplemented stuff in these dlls). When users know where to look for, it could avoid a lot of dissappointment i guess
participants (8)
-
Adam Petaccia -
Alexander Nicolaysen Sørnes -
Dan Kegel -
Ivan Gyurdiev -
leszek -
Louis Lenders -
Markus -
Scott Ritchie