http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5857
------- Additional Comments From ekkehard.morgenstern@onlinehome.de 2006-05-08 08:52 ------- What's the problem with this?
Is it a legal issue?
From the technical viewpoint, it is incorrect that Wine Explorer behaves like
the File Manager of Windows (NT) 3.x for compatibility with Windows 95,98,NT4,2000,XP. On these versions of Windows, Windows Explorer is a program that also provides the complete Windows desktop functionality. While I do not say that Wine Explorer must behave like Windows Explorer, it would be nice to have the option to have at least something similar. There's no reason why there can't be a version of Wine Explorer that provides a unique Wine desktop and file manager. It could be made incompatible with Windows insofar that it doesn't try to emulate COMCTL32.DLL V6 or Windows Explorer, but would provide a WINECTRL.DLL that would have specific Wine controls, and a "Wine Explorer" (probably named differently) with a look and feel different from that of Windows Explorer. This could even solve legal issues, and could make some difference.
The advantage of such a solution would be that users could've an integrated experience of the environment. Say, you have a user on workstation that runs GNU/Linux and Wine, but the user lives in a corporate environment that wants to migrate but cannot for technical reasons (like, there's some legacy software of which source code is no longer available), and it happens that the user works with the legacy software most of the time. Then would it not be convenient to have all that stuff in one place?
Currently I'm using GNOME, and it's just cumbersome to launch Wine applications and make links to stuff on the desktop. It's not much easier with KDE too. If there was a file manager with integrated DND functionality, it would be easy to drag icons from the Wine side to the GNOME side, for instance.
Well, I'll look into the issue myself, and see what I can do. Perhaps I'll provide a custom desktop generally running on Windows, and on Wine also, and people like me will be happy. I could also integrate that in Wine if there no objections, someday.