Is Wine worth the trouble?
 

I am debating if I should get into wine applications. I have recently switched from Linux from Windows XP Professional. I think some windows applications are very good. But I do not know if I want to saccrafice the pride of not haveing any windows crap on my computer. I have a good replacement for most every program I used on windows and they are all free. Wine sounds like it would be a headache to get the programs working. I could imagine how well they would run under emulation. It sounds like they will crash. Also I am not crazy about putting microsoft products on my computer at all. Am I being over paranoid about putting windows apps on my computer or should I keep my stance and not have any windows programs?

Do whatever you like :) I use Wine for a couple of games, and some other Windows software that is, to me, absolutely irreplacable (such as Buzz). It can be a minor headache at times, but generally, once it's configured properly, it runs without incident. If anything crashes, at least you can be fairly certain it won't take your whole operating system (or your whole network) down along with it!

I know of no software made by Microsoft that does not have a better free/OSS replacement, with the possible exception of Access (which still has no counterpart in OpenOffice) - but if you're serious about database work, there are several far more powerful database systems, such as MySQL and PostGreSQL; if you're just tinkering with databases, there are a lot of special-purpose simplified databases available also. For anything else in the MS Office suite, OpenOffice or KOffice are perfectly adequate. Name anything else MS makes and I bet you could find three or four better free/OSS packages to replace it.

Wine is not an emulator
http://www.winehq.com/site/myths#slow
There are many free alternatives. I only use wine when I have to. It's better than having to boot into windows.

How is Wine run. In sytem memory, attached to the exe, loaded on boot up, ect.... One thing I don't want to do is have MS going around on my system or receiving my information. Will this happen if I install wine?

Wine has no connections with Microsoft, and will not report information back to them. Wine allows you to run Windows programs with no Microsoft code required, if that's what you want.

Wine works by loading the executables itself, then passing control to Linux which runs them as normal.

I don't see how it could, unless you use it to run Windows software that does that sort of thing. Wine is a completely independent implementation of the Windows API. Wine only runs when you tell it to - I don't know the details, but what it does is provide a compatibility layer for Windows programs to run on. It doesn't emulate Windows (since there's no need to replicate the behavior of the x86 processor in software). It just provides Windows programs with the necessary hooks and libraries to execute properly. You're just running Windows programs without Windows :)

if youre interested in gaming with wine, try this link:
http://www.transgaming.com

I could never get anything I wanted to work with Wine. Sure I could get things I didn't want, like Notepad, to work. But some of my favorite games? Nope.

If Wine had been fully capable five years ago it would have been a killer app. Now, virtually anything you need you can find in a Linux alternative. And games? Buy a play station.