Wine vs. VMWare (Was: Wine: MS Money 2004 + IE6)

[Thiers Botelho]

On 6/12/06, Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
> On Monday 12 June 2006 03:26, Thiers Botelho wrote:
> > The more I read this thread the more convinced I become that this
> > Wine / crossover way of life is a PITA and a clear invitation to
> > endless hassle.
> >
> > What's a faithful wine user to do (I mean the lucky user who's
> > eventually got ALL his Win apps working) - NEVER upgrade Wine or
> > any of the apps for fear of breaking some of them ???
> >
> > I think that nowadays it'd be a LOT easier to have a vmware machine
> > with windoze and fire it up whenever needing some app from that OS.
> >
> > License-wise I believe / suppose that most users of wine are
> > dual-booters anyway (or at least still keep ye olde MS-Eula), so
> > the use of Windoze under vmware would bring no legal issues to
> > worry about.
> >
> > Of course you should have a good amount of RAM for that . . . and
> > (supposing again) that's not a big problem nowadays for most,
> > barring the older laptops.
> >
> > Any comments / corrections ?
>
> The problem with wine is that it's a moving and a hidden target. It's
> also still in beta :-)
>
> As the devs implement more and more functionality some things are
> bound to break as we progress. These things eventually stabilize.
>
> The use cases for wine and vmware are slightly different. An app in
> vmware doesn't integrate nicely into your desktop for instance, dnd
> becomes a pain on vmware (even if it is ever possible) and one might
> not want the overhead of a full vm. Take games - most modern ones
> need a hefty machine to run well. You need an even heftier machine to
> run them in a vm.
>
> Alan McKinnon

When I made the posting above I was considering productivity apps
mainly. Games are a different kind of beast, I agree the reqs are
higher.

OTOH, from what I read on forums and mailing lists, games are less
quirky under Wine than some apps. Since the time Win98 was the most
"advanced" Windoze I hear people complaining that "the latest wine
upgrade broke my IE / Ms-Office / Quicken / whatever". I'm sure these
things will eventually stabilize, as soon as MS goes out of business.

When you speak of dnd you mean Dungeons & Dragons, right ? I don't
think it'd be Department of National Defense  . . .     ;)

Cheers

Thiers