Rick Romero wrote:
On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 00:12, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Why are we in this position? For reasons I will not go into right now, it seems painfully obvious to me that we are suffering from a severe case of Bad Public Image (tm). Whenever I talk to people not intimately familiar with Wine, about our beloved project, I am _always_ treated with the same reaction: a surprised "Really, it works? Hmmm, I thought it was only running Freecell...". Translation: people consider Wine a huge hack that can run (by some strange happenings) some apps, sometimes. It is viewed as unreliable, "freak of nature sideshow"; something (maybe) cool to talk about, but utterly useless.
Being a long time troll and admittedly bad problem reporter, my lack of experience tends to send me down the wrong path, I can tell you what MY impressions of Wine are.
My first success with Wine was quite a few years ago, running Agent .99. At that time, it seemed Win16 programs would have a chance, but Win32 wouldn't make it.
Since then, I've purchased Crossover products, and been pleasantly surprised by the applications that run under it. I was astonished to see GetRight work 100%, and almost taken aback to see Delta Force (and it's funky Voxtel engine) running under wine. (Ok DF3 doesn't QUITE make it, but DF1 and DF2 are more than I ever expected. Hmm Maybe desktop mode would work..)
I would love to convert my desktops to Linux + Wine, but one 'little' thing keeps nagging at me (even if my apps did work perfectly). I haven't seen it uttered in a while, but the phrase, "Wine is ALPHA software" sticks in my head.
People know what beta software is, and when someone see's "Alpha", they're not even going to attempt do debug it. Alpha (at least to me) conjures up such a raw state of affairs, that whatever problem is occurring, is happening because "Alpha" is seen as horribly broken.
I am beginning to believe that wine is not very alpha anymore. It is more likely to run the program than crash and in some situations can be used in a production environment. So while I do not suggest that we immediately drop the alpha designation I would seriously ask what remains to be done to get rid of it.
I realize this isn't the case. I'm also sure that a lot of people DON'T realize that. I think CodeWeavers has greatly helped Wine's image by giving it a version number.
I wonder if people think CodeWeaver's Wine is THAT much of a different product than WineHQ's Wine..
I think that for mass appeal branding works better. These products are worth the money to the end user and provide a way for them to contribute to wine development. For those users that are willing and able to contribute to the project I welcome them. However most users will simply want it to work and for them the best way is to use one of these products.
Just another perspective, I'll be quiet now :)
Oh, and www.winehq.com seems to be down (can't connect from RoadRunner or Savvis networks)
I also cannot connect.
Tony Lambregts