When you think about wine, what comes to your mind? Maybe some of these thoughts,

• Intoxicating
• Delicious
• Smooth
• Elite

Well, the open source Wine software isn’t very far from these definitions either. People in the Windows world have always hesitated to give up GAMING just for the sake to switching to Linux. And this gap, this barrier has forever seemed to shrink, but never made close enough.

A big majority of Linux users simply put forward arguments which are valid but not convincing enough for a comfortable Windows XP user. Though, still Linux remains what it is, not-for-laymen, some useful softwares such as Firefox, Pidgin, Konqueror (rather KDE), Thunderbird make it less so.

why windows software ??

Technically, open source formats and technologies such as OGG, OpenGL, etc. are much more superior than proprietary technologies such as MP3, DirectX, etc. This reminds me of the dialog in the movie “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”, where the character of Bill Gates is dancing in front of Steve Jobs for having released Windows 3.1 prior to Macintosh. Steve Jobs is angered by the whole thing and retaliates by saying “Still, our product is much better” and Bill replies “You see, that doesn’t matter!”.

In a world that uses Windows based platforms and API in majority, whether good or bad, the availability of software specifically made for Windows is much much common than that for others. Hence, a lot of effort is being put in to be able to execute “Windows based software” on Linux. Some of the strides in this direction are Wine, Code-weavers and Transgaming Cedega. While the latter two are paid software, Wine comes for free.

my experiences

With a combination of Wine, Cedega and Code-weavers, Linux users are able to run most softwares and games written for Windows. I have myself used Wine to play Age Of Empires II Expansion 1.0 and Cedega 4 to play Counter Strike Condition Zero.

problems with wine

The spectrum of support for Windows software on Linux is growing each second. The worst part about Wine is that its interface still inherits the not-for-laymen tag of Linux. It is really too painful to tell Wine where my Windows folder is, which DLL to use from Windows and which ones to use from the Wine built-ins. There are specific issues around each software that you want to run using Wine. Though Cedega 6.0 tries to provide a better interface, but the problems are similar.

layman’s perspective

A layman doesn’t understand what is Wine. Why do we have to configure it in order to make it work. Which DLL files will be required to run his game using Wine. He has a setup CD of WoW and all he expects is that when he double clicks ‘setup.exe’, it will install his software by pressing next-next-next-finish and then when he double clicks the game icon, it will start running.

I am a Linux person if you ask what I prefer. I like to fight through problems and make things work on my Linux OS rather that rebooting to Windows XP. But to put it in simple words,

Windows is like a Maruti 800, slow, fragile and un-powerful, easy to drive, can’t take much load and needs a mechanic once in a while. Linux, on the other hand is a train engine, fast, powerful, robust, unpolished, not presentable and it takes an expert to drive it ON track.