Your Wine performance point is definitely interesting. Wine doesn't have a structured performance and benchmarking test-bed at the moment, as such performance comparisons are rather difficult to quantify. Back in early 2006, there was a little ad-hoc test done with the 0.9.50 release of Wine, against Windows XP on the same hardware. The results page is below:
http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMark-0.9.5
As I'm sure the person who performed the benchmarking would tell you, these results should be taken with a grain of salt. Wine's codebase has expanded considerably (we're now on a 1.1.17 developmental release) and similarly Vista has been released, so these results are definitely dated. The conclusions I'll leave to the reader, however.
I am also a little curious about your hardware support point. I must confess I don't keep up with manufacturer decisions, could you point me to a few articles illustrating what you meant? I know for instance that Intel reduced their in-house support for Linux, by open-sourcing the majority of their drivers, which meant inclusion in the tree and thus "out of the box" support for those particular drivers. The scenario of Nvidia being very slow in supporting newer cards on Linux is also something I'm aware of (no accelerated 3D support for anything above the 9600GT I think), but I can't say I've heard much about actual decisions to reduce support at all, so much as not expand it. Perhaps I misinterpreted though, and that's what you meant. Either way, I would be interested if you have an relevant articles on this, always good to learn about these things.
What I was trying to say is, I have played with Linux in the past, and some of the hardware I used to have was actually plug and play compatible with Linus, I didn't have any problems.. But recently when I tried to install Linux on my old media PC, it completely and utterly hated my video card, which I got last year, I couldn't get it to work for the life of me. For that matter, I couldn't even get my Wifi to work with my PC or the adapator. Fact is, in a industry revolving around windows based OS, most hardware will work best with windows. The first thought that goes through a developers head is NOT, "How will Linux handle this?".
As a matter of fact, in my own area, the interest in Linux has simply declined. It used to be, there was several computer shows around the area, that would offer Linux based computers. Now it is either windows, or a barebones, without an OS. From what I read, some software developers are even dropping support for it. Adobe is a good example of this. Or from what I have heard. | |
Trosh Kubyo wrote:
From what I read, some software developers are even dropping support for it. Adobe is a good example of this. Or from what I have heard. That may be true in some places, but Adobe is certainly not one example. Their two major web technologies, Flash and Flex, have first-class support for Linux, offering native clients in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. They have never offered their creative suite for Linux, which is unfortunate, but their interest in supporting Linux on the web certainly is not waning. One story I heard which supports "what you read" is EVE Online, which dropped Linux support when Cedega (who was responsible for supporting the client on Linux) was found to have worse support for it than Wine (which is Free and open source, unlike Cedega.) So, rather than have an officially supported Linux build, some software vendors are simply letting their Linux users utilize the Windows compatibility layer that Wine provides. This isn't as good as first-class support, but as Wine improves it may become acceptable to more and more end-users. | |
I'm inclined to suggest that an overwhelming majority of developers have never thought about "How will Linux handle this?", and never will do. This is hardly a new issue, Linux has dealt with it for the whole 18 years of it's existence. That's why a majority of the hardware that does work on Linux has no manufacturer support. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that Linux has or ever will have better (as in a wider range of) hardware support than Windows, however I don't feel your initial statement was entirely fair, as it painted a picture of manufacturers jumping ship on Linux and dooming it to the history books, when truthfully the manufacturers were never on the ship to start with. It's a shame your hardware support seemed to regress, don't suppose you filed any bug reports so that the people who made the drivers would know you had a problem and could fix it?
As for retailer showcasing, that is interesting. However I don't see it as a problem. I suspect you and I can definitely agree, Linux is designed for a certain kind of user. I don't think those users have a taste for retail machines, really. If I might offer a potential explanation, those shows jumped on the Ubuntu hype, then realised it wasn't really worth the effort for them. This is not terribly new either, it happened a lot in 2001 when RedHat had Fedora Core hit the market, 6 months to a year of trade shows showcasing Linux PCs alongside their usual complement of Windows/barebones boxes, then it fizzled out. Similarly with Slackware in 1998, although that as before my time really. Once again, I can't help but feel you are painting somewhat of an unfair picture, perhaps in part due to drawing only from limited personal experience. Proprietary software developers are certainly a good point. Adobe did drop support for some of their products on Linux, back in 2006. On the flip-side however, Adobe also brought native 64 bit browser plugin support for flash to Linux (as an alpha currently), while Windows still doesn't have this support. Adobe likes to use Linux as their flash development and testing platform, because of the rich user feedback on bugs. They also have 64 bit reader support, although pretty well all Linux distributions can (and do, by default) provide you with a open-source reader that is more stable, performs better and is less obtrusive, rendering Adobe's reader a poor second choice, to be avoided. On the whole though, it's typically much the same as manufacturers, they didn't jump ship, they were never on the ship to start with. I'm more than happy to accept that Linux could not and would not suit most people's needs. That's more than fine, I don't think I've ever heard anyone on BYOND trying to support what is obviously a sweeping and inaccurate proposition. What does trouble me though, is that you seem to be painting an unduly grim picture of Linux in general, based solely on limited personal experience and pin-hole-esque exposure to Linux and the issues surrounding it's development. I don't happen to comment on US politics when I see articles and forum posts asking for more information on a particular US political issue. The reason for this is quite simple, I don't feel personally qualified to make an accurate and valuable post on the matter. If someone is asking for more information on a US political issue, my ill-educated opinion (based on very meagre personal experience and questionable media sound-biting) isn't something I would consider to be a valuable answer and my providing it would most probably just lead to misinformation, even if the general points were correct. If there is anything I don't want to be responsible for, it's giving people the wrong answer, because that just isn't good for any of us. Ultimately this is why I opted to ask for more detail from your statements. Your opinion is fine, Linux is not the Operating System for you. The statement that Linux isn't really the Operating System for gamers currently is also fine. Your wider points about Wine, software support and driver support however I feel are both sweeping and misleading, and thus would do more harm than good, if we hadn't explored them in more detail. I wouldn't dream of making sweeping and misleading statements about Windows (perhaps unlike some of my fellow Linux users), for the reasons I've listed. It does us much better to base our judgements on facts and merit, a meritocracy if you will. =P | |
emulated environment WINE stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator'. It's actually in the name. WINE is a virtualisation layer - that's something quite different. For example, it's theoretically possible to write a virtualisation layer that's faster than what you're virtualising. | |
Jp wrote:
it's theoretically possible to write a virtualisation layer that's faster than what you're virtualising. Theoretically you can also run faster than a speeding car, but I don't see that happening any time soon. =P | |
It's reasonably conceivable with a virtualisation layer. You're converting one set of API calls to another set of API calls - in the case of WINE, Windows API to a bunch of different Linux APIs. There's minimal overhead - in the best case, one function call. In the more normal case, a few assignments and some simple arithmetic before a function call - this is O(1) overhead, and it's not a big constant. If whatever Linux API is substantially faster at performing some piece of functionality X than the Windows API - quite conceivable, they're different APIs, they do different things differently, there will be speed differences - then a program that relies heavily on functionality X could well run faster under WINE than under Windows.
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My girlfriend's father was having a fit last week because he refuses to use anything other than linux and was saying that adobe flash was going to be dropping support for linux.
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He should probably chill out. swfdec would probably be matching adobe for quality if Adobe's BLOB plugin hadn't stolen the limelight.
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Technical classifications and terms aside, I think it would fit in the definition of the word 'emulate' to say Wine emulates (imitates) Windows, regardless of how the program's actual workings is called. So using the term in relation to Wine wouldn't be necessarily incorrect.
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Lets be clear, emulation and imitation are not the same thing. And in the computer world, emulation means something very specific. Wine is most certainly not an emulator(Wimcne?). You could call it an imitator, though. That would be more accurate.
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You'd call it a thin compatibility layer, really. I'm afraid that "technical terms aside" just doesn't work for technical matters. My main worry with this entire thread of conversation is that you are getting off the OP's topic and into semantics. I'd like to avoid that, please.
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If Adobe were dropping Linux support, it would be widely covered in the tech news. So, to check out your story, I used Google, which tracks tech news pretty closely.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Adobe+drops+linux I see stories about Adobe adding Linux support to Flex, and the story about when Adobe stopped charging for Flash on devices, allowing cheap Linux computer distributors to make more economical distribution deals with Adobe; and I see article titles like "Adobe treats Linux as first-class citizen". However, nowhere is the telling headline "Adobe drops Linux support" which we will surely see if and when Adobe decides Linux isn't worth the effort. That day may come, too. Once Free Software implementations of Flash become truly compatible, many Linux distributors may prefer to use those instead of Adobe's closed-source binary and the number of Adobe Flash users on Linux may dwindle to the point where it's not worth supporting. Even that I doubt, however; because Adobe is always going to want to be the vendor of the premier client, so it will engineer newer and better features into its mainline client every time the third-party players catch up. | |
Those screenshots are visual examples of why I love Linux, but they are simply one of many ways of seeing it. I create both of those themes as a mashup of many other peoples work. You can easily find every piece of them on one of a hundred sites, but you will only find their combination in one place, my computer. And I didn't break a license agreement on a single bit of it. I did everything I wanted to with them, and I feel no fear that someone could, even if it was petty, try to pursue me legally for my work. It is freedom.
So, you ask, what's good about it? I ask you, what's good freedom?
I own three legal licenses to Windows XP, my mother uses one of them, another is used, but it is only there when I absolutely must use Windows for something, which grows rarer everyday. The third goes unused. A meaningless, valueless string of numbers glued onto the bottom side of my laptop, getting in the way of heat extraction.