Dan Kegel wrote:
I've run into people several times who dislike the fact that I advocate or even work on the Wine project, because they feel that it takes focus away from working on the Linux desktop. I beg to differ, but I've never had a really snappy comeback for them. It happened again today, and this time it occurred to me I should write a page on the topic to organize my thoughts. Here it is: http://www.kegel.com/wine/why.html Comments welcome.
Thanks, Dan
Dan, first of all, thanks for writing that dowm. I agree with what you say, until you reach the "But doesn't Wine take away the incentive for native ports?" section.
I actually appreciate this reason, as it clarifies a 'feeling' that I've been unable to clearly express about this issue:
2. once Linux's market share is above 20%, there will be a strong economic incentive to do native Linux ports anyway, because running a Windows app under Linux will always feel strange.
But I wonder if this is in fact true.
I am a pure Linux user; I began my migration a year and a half ago, moving from a dual-boot, to a multi-boot (2 versions of Windows and 5 distributions of Linux on one system), and finally ditched all alternate boots except the Linux a few months ago.
So I'm not all that far from the migration mindset, since I used Windows for over 10 years, but as a pure Linux user, I'm not all that close to it anymore, either.
I've got Wine running, and installed several programs I was familiar with under Windows, mostly to perform tasks that I couldn't figure out how to do under Linux, but which I either knew how to perform using Windows apps, or could find HOW-TOs for that specified Windows apps. I find that it doesn't necessarily "feel strange" or at least as strange as I might have imagined. What mostly feels strange is the complications of getting the program started in the first place (having to cd to the application folder to run wine <program_name> from a terminal, or having to write a little start script in order to make a panel shortcut to it).
Once the program is running, though, it doesn't "feel" strange at all; after all, the reason I'm running it is most likely because I'm familiar with it. This of course, assumes that the program in question runs well under Wine, which we will assume for the sake of this discussion, if you don't mind ;-) .
I have admittedly found that it's ultimately "easier" (for me) to re-encode a video with transcode and mplex than it is to do so using TMPGEnc under Wine, which was a surprise given that I know squat about re-encoding video (I know somewhat more, now, though). I also found that given a choice between equivalent Linux native programs and Windows programs under Wine (Aisle Riot and Pretty Good Solitaire), I'll often choose the Linux native program simply because it's easier to *start* (not because I prefer it, per se).
Maybe that's what you (and I) mean by "feeling strange", but since I'm not sure what causes this feeling, I am not certain that migrating XP users, who are used to and have no complaints with XP functionality but rather are migrating because they don't like the Windows security model (or lack therof)-- meaning, for practical reasons such as increasing cost for less value, rather than philosophical ones such as a deep objection to Windows' design philosophy or business practices-- would feel the same way after switching to Linux.
All of those "a computer is just a tool" people who find it more strange and painful to use the command-line, or get confused if they have to read --help output or a man page "just to get something done" may well find that their relief at having these familiar tools available swamps any "strange" feelings of (guilt,irritation?) that they may (or may not) experience when running Windows programs under Linux.
After all, you'll only have those feelings if you *care*-- and many, many users don't.
If I come up with a "better" reason #2, I'll let you know ;-) .
Holly