Why Wine is Important!

Posted by Rpim on May 15, 2012 3:50 PM EDT
LXer Linux News; By Rpim
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LXer Feature: 15-May-2012

Wine enables you to run some Windows programs on Linux. If we work on wine I think Linux the desktop will become extremely popular and successful. I'll explain why. You often here people say things similar to gaming on Linux is rubbish..

Wine enables you to run some Windows programs on Linux. If we work on wine I think Linux the desktop will become extremely popular and successful. I'll explain why. You often here people say things similar to gaming on Linux is rubbish..

But gaming on Linux isn't rubbish. In fact in most gaming areas I think there are brilliant alternative games for Linux! The reason "they" say this could be because Windows and Mac native games are often not also Linux native. So "they" can't play with their friends using Linux who are using Windows and (possibly) Mac native games. Unless they try Wine.

With Wine they often can run Windows native games and programs on Linux. Just one flaw: Wine is not perfect, so some people who switch from Windows to Linux are frustrated when Wine will not run their games and/or programs properly. But if we can improve Wine drastically we could potentially attract a boatload more users to Linux.

I guess some people who really want people to use open source software (because of ethical values) might possibly not want people to use Wine on Linux because the chances are that people who are using wine on Linux will use it to run proprietary software. But let me assure those people, this is the long term solution. Wine will get people 'ver the hump' as it were using Linux but after a while those people would hopefully start using FOSS/Linux native software more and more (even though they still use Wine.)

But there is one thing I have not talked about, how we achieve this goal!!!

First of all I'd like to encourage people to help develop Wine. In my opinion the more you work on Wine, the bigger the Linux desktop market share will become. Secondly I'd like to encourage companies such as Google to invest in wine. Believe me it is the key to making the use open source software grow. Next if it to doesn't have it all ready, Wine needs patent protection, in terms of people to check the wine source code for patent infringement.

And finally I'd like to suggest that companies like Canonical, Red Hat and others include Wine on their Linux distros. Google might be able to eventually put wine on Android by default.

Thanks for reading.

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Subject Topic Starter Replies Views Last Post
Attracting users djohnston 12 2,779 May 28, 2012 1:57 PM
Wine of android is a bit of a lost cause. WorBlux 1 3,452 May 16, 2012 9:22 AM

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