Mike Hearn wrote:
As for Cedega/WineX - well, they have a big lead in gaming, but I'd like to think that one day Wine will be the swiss-army knife of Windows emulation. Regular Wine does have DX support, we should work on that rather than be distracted by a pseudo-proprietary fork.
thanks -mike
I would like that too, actually, and I doubt I'm alone. Did you hear that TG is now offering a time-limited demo version so you can (finally) try before you buy? The thing is, this fragmentation of the Wine project really hurts Wine as a whole, and it just makes me wild.
It's confusing to people who simply want to run their programs. Wine actually works better than people are led to believe by the general scuttlebutt. WineX/Cedega does not work as well as TG would have one believe (not to mention that many users object to the way TG chooses what individual games to build support for, without regard to other games of the same class/engine, or fairly often breaking something that did work under previous versions). Crossover seems to be damn near perfect-- as long as you stay within its definitions of what it will deal with (but what it will deal with, it won't screw up in any way whatsoever, which is more than you can say for the other two variants).
So how are Bob and Betty Newbie (and their kids) supposed to know what to do when they need to run a Windows program? There's no Big Board to say "if Program X then do this; if Program Y, then do that." And we all surely know the consequences of trying to figure out which version of which Wine variant runs any given application.
And if you can't figure that out, you will have a (very) bad impression of the project as a whole, which is an argument that cannot be effectively countered.
Amazingly, in this sea of confusion, Wine appears to be the stable(st) leg. Crossover is a great product, but is not so flexible (on purpose, no offence intended). Cedega is just not stable; no one knows from version to version whether something that worked is going to be broken, no one knows when support for desired things (new or old) is going to show up; you just pay with a leap of faith-- which many people understandably object to.
Wine, on the other hand, gives a general impression of moving forward at all times. Yes, there are regressions; yes, things break that used to work. But because Wine works on supporting APIs and functions, rather than specific applications (which policy I support when Crossover does it, and object to when TG does it), when DX8 applications get working "perfectly" under Wine, I (as a user) can feel confident that *all* DX8 apps will then work (at least as far as DX is concerned, notwithstanding quirks of individual apps). Which for me as a user, is much more of a load off my mind in terms of trying to keep track of how to get whatever random app I or my family might want to run working, than trying to read anybody's (or in fact, everybody's) application database(s) to try to figure out how best to proceed, as I currently must do.
And Wine really does get noticeably better from month to month, which is quite heartening-- and the fact that the project exudes a sense of hopefulness is not to be sneezed at. People are confused by many of the changes, but in case no one has bothered to say, symlinking the drive paths is *brilliant*. The auto-setup on first run is pretty cool, too. And I can certainly attest that I have run several programs that are supposed to work better on WineX (as it was then), which in fact ran better on Wine (or in fact, ran only on Wine).
Not to mention that WineHQ is the source of all in the first place, and that to WineHQ we have no ethical objections (as so many do with TG). Oh yes, I would love to see Regular Wine become the Swiss Army Knife that it is meant to be, that users expect it to be, and that it deserves to be.
Then we won't have to counter any arguments, because "is Wine a good thing or a bad thing?" becomes a matter of pure philosophy-- and users don't have time to argue philosophy, being busy actually getting something done, using tools that work.
Holly