On Wednesday 10 December 2008 19:09:16 Dan Kegel wrote: http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/65431.html quotes Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical: "We aren't considering a pitch about using Wine or Parallels like on a Mac. There is no real look at Wine. It doesn't always work well. So this won't win over users to the benefits of Linux,"
So there you go. Canonical will think about Wine once it always works well.
I agree with Canonical that perhaps it doesn't make sense to make a Winebuntu or a new Ubuntu with Wine as a bigger focus for exactly that reason, it doesn't work for everything and that isn't a great experience. (Anything thats inconsistent is bad for something like Ubuntu. We love Wine but fact is fact, it isn't univerally perfect so they can't advertise 'Full Windows Application Support!' etc. etc. They could advertise 'Will Work with Some Windows Apps!' but then users ask which ones and it gets confusing from there and yada yada...)
However perhaps it does make more sense to think about using Wine for application specific scenarios.
I believe it has been proposed before to have .debs for things like Adobe Photoshop which first install Wine (or create a new prefix etc.) and then ask for the Photoshop CD; sort of like application specific bundlings of Wine.
Do we know Canonical's stance on that? That scenario could be consistent and provide real end user benefit sans confusion.