Photoshop in Linux

For all the effort that's gone into WINE and Codeweavers, they could have had native ports of practically everything. Of course the difference is there are no native ports without vendor cooperation. I just don't see it as worthwhile, because both Linux and Windows are moving targets, as are the apps themselves. Better to put that energy into either native ports or clones, I think over the long run it's less work and better results.

> Better to put that energy into either native ports or clones

My thought exactly. Try gimp or xara.

> both Linux and Windows are moving targets

Well, while I'm extremely disappointed in Wine's relative lack of progress over the years and years that I've been watching it, it does have its uses.

XOver's support for IE has saved me having to put in a few Windows boxes for some customers. And it is unlikely that most of the games supported by Cedega would ever have native ports, especially after the Quake3 and Loki debacles of 2000.

Accpac, one of the few heavy duty business accounting packages for Linux, also uses Winelib last I checked. They were actually pretty impressed with Winelib. I spoke with one of the developers a few years ago and he said that Winelib had come a long way since the Wordperfect 9 days.

> it does have its uses.

Yes it does Steve, mostly for luring companies into contact with Linux. Hopefully, that will also help start the transition of the rest of their applications to Linux.

The other use is gamers. At least until native games are available.

In either case, I see this as a transition, and not as a desirable long term solution. No matter how good wine gets, it's still an emulation.

> No matter how good wine gets, it's still an emulation.

Just a nit. Wine isn't an emulation. It's a reimplementation of the Win32 API plus a simple binary loader for Windows style executables.

Winelib apps are 100% native. Winelib is just another toolkit like QT or GTK+.

It's just that the non-unix origin of WIne's api is all too apparent.

That said, yes it does *feel* like an emulation.

If it wasn't for Wine then I would still be running Windows here. I'm a webdeveloper. I *must* check my websites with IE.

sander:

Moral to that story: Breaking standards is a beneficial tactic for MS to use.

If not for their tactic, you wouldn't have to worry about whether your work excluded a significant part of the market. That sort of lock-in permeates the illegal maintenance of the monopoly and illustrates just how completely ineffectual the "Final Judgment" is. Knowing that so many other millions of people are trapped in the same situation doesn't offer any comfort.

Ooops. I forgot to include what it was I was originally going to say and why I chose that particular quote from TC's post.

The "moving target" question is a frequent one in interviews with Wine developers. From what I gather, and from a practical standpoint, Win32 is a very slow moving target and that poses little additional difficulty to Wine. After all, ISV's still want to sell to all those existing Win98/Me users.

Linux is probably more of a moving target than Windows.

I think that insufficient documentation and the need for bug for bug compatibility are bigger challenges.

Quoting:Moral to that story: Breaking standards is a beneficial tactic for MS to use. If not for their tactic, you wouldn't have to worry about whether your work excluded a significant part of the market.

FireFox has rendering issues of it's own. So do other free browsers. If IE would hold just 10% market share I would still check my work in it. I grant you that IE is by far the worst of the current browsers and IE7 doesn't look much better, but even if they were as standards complient as FF I would check my work with it.

I am going to update my policies with the release of IE7 though. I'm going to lump IE5.x in the same "unsupported" category as NS4 (if the CSS doesn't work without modification I'm giving it no CSS at all) and drop IE6 to legacy status (anything that doesn't work will not get fixed, just degraded gracefully).

With gimp acquiring color control, and xara as an option, adobe photoshop is rapidly becoming irrelevant.