The fact that I don’t have to deal with lib32-gst-plugins-ugly/bad/ect is amazing, but I’ll have to keep 32 bit libraries for Team Fortress 2 and other online Source games.
Dont hold your breath. It’s just initial support. It’s still opt-in and I can’t see Valve using it with Proton by default unless they start supporting native Wayland clients in Gamescope
Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’m still very new to Linux. I have Wine 8 installed, currently just to run one application for one of my games. Should I bother to update to 9 if my current setup is working? I’m still adjusting to the FOSS environment and haven’t quite figured out whether or not I should always update to the latest and greatest just because I can.
A lot of the time the version of wine will cause issues with the application, so if you have something working, stick with it.
It would be worthwhile to look into a wine prefix manager like lutris or bottles for gaming. Regular apps can benefit also, but I am not up to speed on anything not for gaming.
Thanks for the advice! The application I’m using in Wine is Elite Dangerous Market Connector, nota game itself but a small helper app for the Elite Dangerous game. According to the git page, you can get it running from source with Python, but I wasn’t quite skilled enough to get that working.
As far as my actual games go, those seem to all run fine through Steam/Heroic Games Launcher with Proton GE edition, which as I understand it incorporates Wine somehow…? I’m not sure of the specifics, but I assumed Wine in that context would get updated with Proton eventually.
Right, those are the instructions I tried to follow, but had issues in the “running from source” process. I did eventually get it running, but I’d get errors and nothing would work once I tried to start adding the plugins I wanted.
If it works and you are still figuring things out, I suggest not taking specific action right now. Use your package manager to keep your system up to date and it will deal with this in due time.
How about this then. While your neighbors are using wine, it attracts more commercial attention to develop the open source projects that you do actually use. It’s so impactful that you measurably benefit directly from its contributions, like optimizations to the Linux kernel.
You don’t have to agree with it, but you cannot deny the increased investment in open source projects it causes.
For a painfully blatant example see: Steam Deck.
Also for the binary blob purists, how do you feel about all that closed source firmware underpinning your pure world? Isn’t it practically impossible to get completely open source firmware down to the silicon? And even then, do you trust the silicon? Are you running everything on FPGAs?
Hi! “Binary blob purist” here! Yes, it bothers us that so much firmware is proprietary, but we are working to fix that :).
It is possible to have fully free firmware on certain select devices.
The silicon is unchangeable, much like a chair is unchangeable. So being concerned about changing it isn’t really productive. But, RISCV looks promising and a good remedy to the issue of not knowing what it does.
FPGAs would be nice but they aren’t powerful enough yet.
But, at the same time, unless the silicon can make outside connections itself or modify behaviour (a la Intel ME), or has been updated with what is essentially software baked into it that can change it’s behaviour on the fly, I’d say it can be trusted to do the computing you tell it to do and nothing more (again, excluding those processors where we know that it doesn’t like those with the ME).
If you meant onlyoffice, then I think it promises better compatibility with ms office stuff and also itsinterface is closer to it, compared to libreoffice.
Collabora is a company, they funded some work on OnlyOffice which is a FOSS office suite like LibreOffice. I think they also worked on making it web hostable like Google docs (through nextcloud?)
Edit: Apparently now there’s also collabora office suite?
OnlyOffice and LibreOffice are both very good. The former promises better compatibility with ms office files and has an easier interface imo. LibreOffice seems way more featureful
As for why fewer distros have onlyoffice in their repository, maybe because it’s relatively newer? Anyway, it’s available through flatpak and that’s how I use it. I haven’t tried Collabora online stuff
Is abiword foss?
It is the most reasonable of editors/wp I have found, LO gives me a headache looking at 1000 menus/items.
The gtk2 version is stable as a rock, despite of some bad wrap it got last few years.
All modules that call a Unix library contain WoW64 thunks to enable calling the 64-bit Unix library from 32-bit PE code. This means that it is possible to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation. This is called the new WoW64 mode, as opposed to the old WoW64 mode where 32-bit applications run inside a 32-bit Unix process.
Does this change run the 32-bit .exe using x86_64 instructions? From the description it just sounds like it allows 64-bit Linux libraries to be used in place of 32-bit ones, but that the Windows layer still operates in native 32-bit mode. This means there is still a need to emulate 32-bit x86 instructions which I don’t think box64 can do at this time (x86_32 translates to arm32 with box86, x86_64 translates to arm64 with box64). If box86 could translate x86_32 to arm64 then this might work as Wine would handle the conversion between 32 and 64 bit addressing and argument passing into the libraries but I’m not familiar with the inner workings there.
There is an experimental Wayland graphics driver. It's still a work in progress, but already implements many features, such as basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support.
The completion of the PE/Unix separation means that it's possible to run existing Windows binaries on ARM64.
WinRT theming supports a dark theme option, with a corresponding toggle in WineCfg.
The default Windows version for new prefixes is set to Windows 10.
All graphical builtin applications report errors with a message box instead of printing messages on the console.
Old Proton builds probably won’t backport this (unless it’s completely isolated, idk the code layout of Wine). But are old Proton builds still necessary? Occasionally there’s regressions, but are there really any games that require like a 2 year old Proton build?
There are, but it’s complicated. Doom (2016) for instance - it doesn’t handle the very large Vulkan swap chain that’s possible on some modern graphics cards, crashes on start-up. Someone patched Proton around that time so that Doom would start; the patch was later reverted since it broke other games. Other games based off of that engine - couple of Wolfensteins, Doom Eternal - have the problem fixed in the binaries, and so run on up-to-date Proton, but depending on your hardware, only a few specific, old, versions of Proton, will do for Doom.
Regressions get fixed - that’s okay. Buggy behaviour which depended on regressions that got fixed - that’s a problem.
Well at least I’m not here perpetuating the delusion that desktop Linux desktop is as user-friendly and productive for every use-case as Windows and macOS are. If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.
It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
Just buy a windows license next time.
Here’s the thing, I can get a legit Windows license by various means. I don’t need to go into microsoft.com and get it for 300$, a second hand windows machine with an old i5 CPU will sell for 50$ and that includes a valid Windows license. Computers selling on retail stores also include a Windows license, students can get them for free etc. what else?
Well at least I’m not here perpetuating the delusion that desktop Linux desktop is as user-friendly and productive for every use-case as Windows and macOS are.
Wait, are you saying Windows and macOS are user-friendly and productive for every use-case? That’s hilarious!
You’re doing something worse, complaining about something that no one really does. The average Linux user doesn’t want the average computer user to install Arch Linux. Stop spamming this garbage.
Oh yes, I value and like Linux a LOT… just not for desktop as it doesn’t deliver as everyone says it does. To be fair I believe that only someone who values Linux as much as I do would be comfortable to criticize what’s wrong with it.
Well I can’t spend all my time trying to fix ridiculous issues that would’ve been fixed by now if people had the balls to look at Windows XP source code…
It is called free because it allows you the freedom to hack the code and make it fit your needs, not because of cost. Like you say, freedome can be expensive, so go cheap and use authentic windows with a paid license, closed code binary blobs, and blind trust to the megacorp selling it.
Not without getting sued, no. But you could do a double blind on it. One person reads it and describes it in freeform prose, and another reads the prose then writes code to implement it as described. In the absence of documents describing the implementation details, this can sometimes work as it will avoid the copyright argument.
Still sketchy though, and you’d really have to verify isolation.
Still difficult in another sense. The person who was reading the code live on twitch or whatever, could never in the future work on wine. They’d have to commit to long term seperation from the project.
(Plus, they’d probably want to do it anonymously, since they’ve illegally obtained the source code.)
Instead of leaving snide comments like this, you can use your head to open up an IDE, implement the features you want, and make a pull request. Keep it to yourself
It’s a miracle we have wine at all, reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy. Be grateful for what we have (which is already enough to run a ton of software really well)
reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy
Have you noticed the the NT / Windows XP source code was leaked years ago. There’s isn’t much of a need to “reverse engineering”, it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…
Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.
See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup
Guess that rule was in place because some people would look at it and proceed to copy it. The rule should be “if you copy code from Microsoft you’ll be kicked from the project and the code removed”. While I see why this is place and what it protect the project from this is also a very big roadblock to the project’s evolution and a clear example of what’s wrong with it and why we still have compatibility issues.
Nope, because if you write code and they can prove you were influenced by leaked proprietary code in any way then they will sue the shit out of you and shut you down.
Also see Halt and Catch Fire for a show with this as a plot point. It’s very real though.
?? Historically it's been an issue where you need to prove you didn't do it, because otherwise the companies would bury you in legal fees trying to defend yourself. You're like...trying to argue an alternate universe to how this normally plays out.
What happened in the past was lazy developers cutting corners and effetely copying code and thinking that by switching a few variable names and the order of some operators they would get around the problem.
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