Another major application that may be interesting to support is SolidWorks. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=8983
Why ?
- It's one of the most popular CAD application for mechanical design and engineering, and surely the most used for educationnal purposes. Although the industrial version is quite expensive, thousands of $ or €, it is availiable for free for students in europe, and currently, it is the only app that may prevent them from switching from Windows to Linux.
- The Vista version is a pure disaster (or is vista the disaster ?), on a high-end notebook, it runs much slower than on a 4-years old low-end one with Win2K ! I saw many users really disappointed having to switch their brand new notebook back to XP, So there is a real "market" for linux/wine here !
- No MacOs version or alternatives.
- No opensource alternatives, and no linux native equivalents too ( Pro/E used to have a linux version, but i have no news about it )
Technically, most of the work seems to be done, i'm regularly testing it against new wine versions, and it mostly works, except 3 blocking bugs that prevent any real use. Unfortunately, it looks like there are no other apps impacted, as I saw no evolution for long months. :
+ installation just works out of the box, no tricks needed, so testing is really simple, as the downloadable version can be run without registration during one month.
+ The modeler, the parasolid kernel, works perfectly. Very big assemblies can be opened and modified, and all the functions works, except one.
- The most important function, extrude, is crashing, but it is related to the UI only, I guess. unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the problem. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9545
- OpenGL child windows bug http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2398, or its cousin is still here, it was mostly solved by this patch http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/attachments/20070821/b0f56ecf/win... , but actual wine version is in regression.
- Can't save files, looks like some things are missing in storage implementation http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9396
- Big issues with flicker-free screen redraw, causing visual artifacts and huge bitmaps to be allocated ( surely sync issues, causing0 messages to be passed in bad order, with unallocated values) http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9561