[NTLUG:Discuss] Wine presentation

[Steve Baker]

Daniel Hauck wrote:
> 
> Sounds like a chicken-egg thing that might work itself out either way.

Well, we've tried the reverse - starving the Linux market of Windoze games
to create a market for native Linux games for all those dedicated Linux
types who won't boot into Windoze...it didn't work.

We've tried writing OpenSource games and giving them away for free - similarly
hopeless - we got 50-some versions of Tetris and 20+ versions of Bomberman
(not to mention a couple of dozen clones of the 'pushing-boxes around in a
warehouse' game)...but where are the OpenSource clones of Quake, The Sims,
etc?  Heck, we even tried building a Linux-based video game console (remember
Indrema?).

So - what's left?   We can't write good native games ourselves (well, not
in anything like enough quantity) - we can't get other people to write native
games for us - porting non-native games doesn't seem to be a good enough
business model - so the only thing left is to make non-Native games work on our
OpenSource platforms without having to port them...hence WINE.

I don't see any other way forward.

Unfortunately, WINE is no solution for non-Intel platforms - and maintaining
it so it'll track all of the many Windoze varients and have enough of Windoze
emulated to cope with increasingly sophisticated games - that's a *HORRIBLE*
job.

> Clearly, however, there is a need to make Windows apps run EASILY under
> Linux.

For everything *except* games, I don't think there is a problem.  Pretty
much every non-game program I need has a good OpenSource replacement.

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