I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, use­less IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of con­fig­ging it worked but couldn’t sub­mit because of that depen­dency… it saved a data file I could sub­mit with Win­dows, though) and am astounded.

After zero-config, installers work mag­i­cally, 3d engines func­tion, and every­thing is gen­er­ally incred­i­ble. I read this on someone’s blog ear­lier today: “with that I was able to install the lat­est Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writ­ing). This comes with bet­ter sup­port for HL2 and WoW.” and con­se­quently was afraid the ver­sion in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and gen­er­ally useless.

No, the author is cor­rect in say­ing “bet­ter support” — there is intrin­si­cally fan­tas­tic sup­port for pretty much every­thing. It’s incred­i­ble. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play var­i­ous games. Linux, appar­ently, is no longer a bar­rier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing chal­lenge as com­pata­bil­ity lay­ers keep grow­ing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, but am con­tent with hav­ing ten­ta­tively embraced the gamer side of geek for one week­end. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough devel­op­ment work to jus­tify it for the next cou­ple of months. MS Office would be a pleas­ant addi­tion to the reper­toire, though OpenOf­fice is excel­lent for most appli­ca­tions. I’d never go back to using Word for prepar­ing real doc­u­ments, but per­haps for things requir­ing collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d prob­a­bly get MS Office for cre­at­ing Pow­er­point templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnec­es­sary. It’s just fan­tas­tic to think that it is, all of a sud­den, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m wax­ing lyri­cal about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the bril­liance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue oth­er­wise… but they’re wrong :-)

Tags: author, Linux, Loki Games, productivity applications, Ubuntu