On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, W�rm wrote:
> The issue of DOS GUI OS's like Seal and Qube is that
> windows will *always* *always* be better than
> them...
Depends on how you define "better."
GEOS was technically better, but not so good at
marketing. They figured their quality would be
spread by word-of-mouth, and they wouldn't need to
spend any money on marketing.
> ...and pretty much everyone owns at least one
> copy of windows...
I'm glad you said "pretty much" cuz I have never
owned, and will never own any kind of M$ Windoze
OS.
> I think the best plan for any place would be to make a
> windows emulator...that would mean that the
> programmers would only need to make one app (the
> emulator), rather than take on the task of writing
> every single app made for windows that has any
> use...and they still wouldn't be as good.
That's sort of what wine is. (Wine Is Not an Emulator)
It's a compatibility layer; a reverse engineered and
rewritten version of Windoze APIs. It's supposedly more
stable even than Windows itself, (though they had to
incorporate some of the bugs, or some programs wouldn't
run!) and runs a HUGE variety of Windoze programs.
I downloaded it once and tried it on the only
Windoze thing I had, Compuserve's installation program.
It didn't work on that... but then, I wasn't too
surprised.
http://www.winehq.com/about.shtml
> Then you would simply have to add compatibility with
> more and more apps as you move along - not sure how
> well this would turn out though.
There used to be a list on the wine site of all
the programs (hundreds) you could run under wine. I
couldn't find it just now, so I don't know if they
stopped updating it, or I just didn't look long enough.
For people who hate Windoze, but *think* they need
to run it for this program or that, wine might be the
tool that lets them migrate to Linux.
- Steve
