I would like to hear opinions and thoughts from people with extensive WINE experience. I have not tinkered with WINE in a few years. I am willing to spend time learning WINE, but I want to know from experienced people whether that will be time well invested.

I am not interested in using WINE for myself but for others. I am working with various people who want to migrate from XP. They own vintage XP hardware. Virtualization is not an option with such old specs. These are folks with 40G hard drives and 1G of RAM.

Overwhelmingly these people have little to no computer skills. The do not know what an icon is or a web browser. All they know is they "click on that blue e thingie." A serious concern then is whether WINE, or PlayOnLinux, can be installed in such a manner as to be seamless to these folks. That is, if I can test and prove to myself that their peculiar piece of vertical or niche software runs on WINE in the first place.

I have browsed the WINE app database and at this point I remain open-minded but not excited. I have seen some of the wiki articles addressing known issues and work-arounds and the information makes my eyes glaze over, let alone think about trying to make this work for people with almost no computer skills.

But I want to be fair and am seeking opinions.

Thanks much for sharing.

Edit: Related to this, when a Window app supports printing, do the Windows printer drivers need to be installed or does WINE work with the Linux drivers in some kind of pass-through mode?

Given the above, the easiest solution might be to not use WINE at all. If they are only using a browser, an email client, a pdf viewer, a media player... they are not going to be that fussed or even notice that they are not using windows applications. I maintained a number of machines at an Internet shop and at the owner's request replaced Windows XP with linux (Debian or Lubuntu depending on the machine. 90% of the users didn't even notice. The ones that did where usually pleased by the change.

If the people have "almost no computer skills" then there's no real need to keep them on Windows software.
Just my opinion but based on some experience in the matter.
jdk

I share your sentiment jdkaye. Unfortunately, I have a current prospect who needs a single vertical Windows app. Some kind of CD library that runs only on Windows. I am not fond of retaining ties to Windows but in this case the customer has the final word. The app is rated above average in the WINE apps database and likely will run fine. My concern is whether I can use WINE seamlessly. That is, just add a desktop icon or menu item and the user won't know the difference.

Another thread question: Is there a way to migrate respective user data files and registry settings? The user does not want to lose app settings, bookmarks, recently used file lists, etc. I get the strong feeling that when using WINE, the process is all about installing from scratch into the WINE environment and the user has to start all over again to reconfigure the app. If true then that is a serious deficiency with WINE.

Wine and Crossover Office both offer ways to run many windows apps. You may have to copy over various things to get best results. Fonts may be off or screens may be off. Not sure wine would be easier than a vm or any more secure.
Depending on the app, dosbox might even work.

Yes, there are many web pages on how to export registry and copy it to a wine install.
Not sure I've ever played with user environment but a file is a file. You kind of run into some issues with some of those questions. For example you wouldn't use a browser in wine, you'd want to use a native browser. Most can import and export bookmarks in some way or another. So, you'd import that data not to wine but to the native browser.

To be fair, windows 7 32 bit may be suitable also.

That can be done. It depends how well the application runs in WINE. I've done it with ms-word.

I am not finding any such tutorials. I have read that the Windows *.reg file is incompatible with WINE regedit. Please provide some links if you know of any such tutorials. I am obviously not using the correct keywords in my searching.

True, but off topic. I am concerned at the moment with only one specific app the customer is using and that app does not have a native Linux counterpart. If that was possible I never would have started the thread.

Okay. I am presuming once I get the app installed a desktop icon will serve to create seamless usage. I have a nominal XP partition but I don't have any XP apps to test. I'll have to download something.

I am sure WINE has improved in the past few years, but I remember nothing good from when I tried WINE.

You can download the Powerpoint viewer from mickeysoft at no charge. Install* it with wine and set up a menu entry or desktop icon to run it using something like this,

env WINEPREFIX="/home/your-user-name/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\POWERPNT.EXE"


I've also done the same thing with XnView, an excellent graphics viewer for ms-windows,

env WINEPREFIX="/home/your-user-name/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\XnView\xnview.exe"

*The easiest way to install a mickeysoft app is to work your way to wherever you stored it on your harddrive with your file manager, right click on it, and pick, "open with WINE" (or something along that line).

I used PlayOnLinux and WINE to test a single proprietary app that a customer needs. PlayOnLinux is a nice front-end to the whole WINE configuration mess. I recommend using PlayOnLinux as much as possible.

The good news is the proprietary app runs without faltering. With PlayOnLinux I was able to reduce the user interface to a single desktop shortcut to match the customer's Windows usage.

The bad news is WINE still can't render menu fonts correctly, something I noticed many years ago. I surfed the web and tried all tweaks I found. Nothing helps.

I installed the proprietary app in a real Windows XP system. The menu fonts render beautifully and respond to changes in the desktop configuration. I did not try clicking my heels three times.

At this point I only hope the customer does not complain much.

Something as basic as fonts should never, ever present problems. I am struggling to accept that WINE users just ignore the menu font problem.

Having the mickeysoft fonts on your Linux system helps.
As XP is installed on another partition, I copy the fonts from \windows\fonts to /usr/share/fonts/TTF
and then run the font scripts from pkgtool.

There are packages around to install the fonts, via a download........ IIRC, Alien Bob has one.

The MS core fonts are installed. They are viewable in the registry.

The good news is ... after a genuine "wine experience," you no longer care about software. At least, not until mid-morning the next day . . .