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Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista 347

Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."
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Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

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  • Woah! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 )
    "Every game but Blackthorne"

    You mean Blizzard made a game before World of Warcraft?
  • by Smordnys s'regrepsA ( 1160895 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @05:41AM (#22271532) Journal
    -just to head this off-

    I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).

    Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.

    Maybe this Linux thing isn't catching on quite as much as you think it is.

    (not trying to troll, just an observation)
    • by Daniel Phillips ( 238627 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:01AM (#22271590)

      I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).
      It has been year of the Linux desktop for 10 years now over here. Yes, it is true, I have never booted Windows box in that period and do not miss a thing except the annoyance. Registration key? Feh.

      At the moment I am running on one of these [fit-pc.com], Ubuntu, everything just worked when I turned it on including sound, Youtube, several different browsers including firefox 3. Runs KDE like a champ, very smooth. While I type, KDE 4 is installing. Not bad for an embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server and just thought I'd try running KDE on it for fun, which turned out to work really well.

      Oh right, time to install openoffice too, you never know when you might need that on a server :-)
    • by jamesh ( 87723 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:23AM (#22271660)

      I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).

      I'd be comfortable declaring this the millenium of Linux on the desktop, i'd even go so far as to say century. Possibly the next decade could be the decade of Linux on the desktop. But I think it's too gradual a shift for there to be a single year we could look back on and say "that was it. that's when it all happened". This is assuming it happens at all of course.
    • by DigitAl56K ( 805623 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:37AM (#22271706)

      I'm Hearing Year of the Linux Machine around here a lot again (again, or continuously... you decide).

      Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.
      Maybe you missed the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex gPC that Walmart has been selling?

      Maybe this Linux thing isn't catching on quite as much as you think it is.
      Maybe. But one thing that is catching on is "anything but Vista". I personally will hang on to XP for as long as I can, and then I will at least invest a reasonable amount of time looking at Linux or Mac before making a final call on Vista. I've used it plenty at work and it's been nothing but pain for me so far. I understand that there are also those that love Vista, or find it's no worse than anything else on offer. However, I think it's probably fair to say that dissatisfaction with Vista is probably greater than with any other OS in a long time, and that will boost Linux conversions.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        Maybe you missed the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex gPC that Walmart has been selling?

        Maybe you missed the fact that Asus posted Windows XP drivers for their Eee PC on their website. Linux was a way of keeping the cost down. And that's the only reason.

      • Maybe you missed the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex gPC that Walmart has been selling? Maybe.

        If he did, he wasn't the only one.

        I've yet to see anyone here post actual numbers for sales of the gPC.

        The rave reviews came from Geeks. Not from the Walmart customer who needed a functional modem, dial-up at $10 a month. Walmart has a lot of customers who fit that profile.

        But one thing that is catching on is "anything but Vista"

        You'll find the gPC at Walmart.com. The only Linux box that you will find at Walmart.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by harry666t ( 1062422 )
      Well, a few of my friends were recently talking something about switching to linux, or just moving away from Vista. Some did. Even my girlfriend said she won't mind using Linux.

      The "problem" with adopting Linux (and/or Vista) is that XP is "good enough". Let's just wait and see if it'd start to turn out that it isn't.

      Or, if you don't like sitting and waiting, go burn some Ubuntu CDs and give them away.

      Hm. I'm slightly offtopic here too. So, my experience with running windows games on current Debian unstable
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AndGodSed ( 968378 )
      Yes I know. I am a huge LX fanboi, but there are still niggles to sort out. I think there will be no "Year of the Linux Desktop", but that Linux acceptance and use will gradually increase until one day it is on a par with every other desktop OS out there.

      I am purposely ignoring Linux niche markets such as servers et al, we are talking about the home user/gamer/office drone.

      I read an interesting review a year ago that compared Vista/XP/Ubuntu as gaming platforms, and Vista and Ubuntu came out tops. The small
    • by ricegf ( 1059658 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:32AM (#22271862) Journal

      Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.

      Y'know, the odd thing is that I have.

      For instance, we hosted several young British missionaries (these were religious missionaries, mind you, not Linux missionaries ;-) at our house last summer (I'm in North America), and they all had laptops (nat'chully). To my surprise, one of them was running Ubuntu. I asked him why he chose Ubuntu over Windows, and he replied with admirable British conciseness, "It doesn't crash so much."

      I've run across several others in my church who were using Ubuntu when I met them (and that one Suse guy ;-). Yes, it's a big church, but it's a church, not an engineering conference or engineering club. Nor is it a high-tech firm such as where I work, where Linux is a rather commonplace choice, even for the spouses.

      I'm no longer surprised to meet "normals" using Linux. I'm more surprised nowadays to find someone like you who hasn't. :-)

      • Most churches I've seen have macbooks rather than anything else - they're popular because they do presentations and 'arty stuff' well.

        The missionaries and charitable arms have whatever is donated to them.. things like Windows 95 are not uncommon.
        Vista is probably 10 years in the future for these kind of organisations.
        • He's talking about members of the church, not the church itself. The members will have the same access to technology as any other cross-section of society.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by coke_scp ( 892822 )
        Are you saying linux isn't a religion?
    • From talking to my non slashdot-reading friends, this may well be the year of the Mac.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 )
      I ran Linux for several years, as well as OS/2 for a couple. Both minoritarian OSs, both with active enthusiast bases.

      The tendency for its partisans to distort the truth regarding the flaws of Windows systems has made me gun-shy of any OS that has these kinds of advocates. The article itself, and its easy debunking, are case-in-point. Running Windows games in either Linux or OS/2 (back in the day) was a fraught, troubled exercise. I wasted a great deal of time trying to get things to run, while reading fant
  • WoW (Score:2, Interesting)

    by imasu ( 1008081 )
    Years ago, just after WoW's beta, I used to run it using cedega. There were still crashing bugs that would hose my friends machines and require rebooting back then; I would just restart cedega when one happened to me. In fact, I don't remember if I *ever* played WoW using a real Windows install. I quit fairly soon after beta though, less than a year.
    • WoW on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

      by krischik ( 781389 ) <krischik@users.s ... t ['e.n' in gap]> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:30AM (#22271678) Homepage Journal
      I too play WoW on Linux - Without cedega that is. There is an endless discussion on the internal cedage forums about it - but the bottom line is: Sometimes it's better to use an up-to-date Wine with OpenGL instead.

      The only thing which does not work is the Microphone - but it won't work the Linux version of Skype either so the trouble is elsewhere.

      See my installation aid: http://martin.krischik.com/index.php/Main/WoWOnLinux [krischik.com]

      Martin
      • Skype seems to work for me OK, at least in echo test I'm using KDE on Arch linux [archlinux.org] basicly all I did was
        install per Skype's instructions,
        install one missing library,
        make an echo call - didn't work
        adjust mic levels in kmixer - didn't work
        adjust input levels in kmixers - didn't work
        un-mute microphone and input lines- woooohh that worked;
        muted un-necessary mics and line and adjusted to sane levels.
  • So this guy takes a whopping 5 games (out of thousands, and most quite obscure) and concludes that system BLA is better than system XYZ. Article mod: -1, Flamebait.
    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by martyros ( 588782 )
      Even worse:
      • Most of the games he's testing DON'T WORK ON EITHER SYSTEM . It's just that under Vista, a lot of them crash.
      • One that doesn't crash -- Civ 4 -- Microsoft warns that it won't work, then doesnt' work; while Wine just doesn't work. How is that better?
      • The first one he tested was a game that he doesn't even play. WTH? "There's a game that I've heard of that I don't play but it doesn't work on Vista so I'm angry."
      • The second game is some ancient DOS game. It won't play because DOSBox doesn't
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by duguk ( 589689 )

        wait until they have a version of DOSBox for Vista?

        Please, explain to me again, why Qbix and the rest of the DOSBox crew should be making emulation software for Microsoft, when they chose not to implement it themselves? It's not really DOSBox's duty to ensure compatibility for Vista.

        The fact that DOSBox and Wine are around as packages to help install and run older software is a bonus.

        Fact is, this software USED to work in older Microsoft Operating Systems... Yet, the article is saying that alternati

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrwolf007 ( 1116997 )
      Actually the test was pretty good.
      The test was designed to test Vista`s compatibility, so the choice of games wasnt bad.
      It included an old DOS-title, several Indie games (not optimized for Vista, but made for XP) and pretty recent well known game (CIV 4).
      Im also pretty sure that DOS-compatibility is at least equal on linux as compared to Vista, based on my own experience.
      I dont know about the coding quality of the indie games but i guess point is, Vista is not compatible to XP. Ok who would have guessed
      • On the contrary, the choice is very bad. It would not surprise me if someone could come up with a set of 5 games that run flawlessly on vista, but fail under wine, which would also say nothing whatsoever about the _general_ compatibility of either platform.

        If I take a look at 5 trees in my city and conclude they are sick, I cannot conclude that all trees are sick. If I test 10 keyboards and conclude they all suck, I cannot make the claim that all keyboards suck.

      • A DOS title isn't really worth testing any more than an Amiga title is. I can run both on my old PowerBook in DOSBox or UAE respectively by hosting an entire copy of the legacy OS and emulating the CPU. If a G4 PowerPC has enough horsepower to emulate the system than a machine that supports the same instruction set really ought to have no problems at all.

        By the way, I tried playing Worms last year in DOSBox and Parallels with FreeDOS. I thought it would be faster in Parallels, but it turns out that Para

    • I haven't had a lot of experience with Vista, but I've been playing games in Linux for a while now because of seemingly poor support for my graphics card (GeForce Go 7300) in Windows XP. I can't play a game more than 20 minutes before it crashes badly (blue screen and all). On the same machine in Linux, I can play UT2004, Doom 3, and Quake natively. Civ 4 runs beautifully under wine with no performance hit that I've noticed. World in Conflict plays in wine too, and although there is definitely a performance
    • What do you expect from these people, they post anything to try and make their system look better.
  • vista gaming (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheSpengo ( 1148351 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:00AM (#22271586)
    In my experience, gaming in Vista caused noticeable performance hits in every game I tried. I lost a 5-ish fps in oblivion, and up to 40 or more in source engine games. I haven't tried in awhile so I don't know if it's gotten any better but that was one of the main reasons for me switching back to XP. I have not tried any of the latest games such as cod4 or crysis in vista. I also did not try the most recent source engine games in orange box which allegedly use DX10 to help speed up some of the stuff vista slowed down. As for gaming in linux, that's something I don't do much because I prefer to get the max performance I can and wine/cedega just don't quite cut it. I do, however, use linux for just about everything else. :)
    • The funny thing is that I found the same thing with XP sometime ago, and that prompted me to investigate gaming on linux (verdict in my case: better for quite a few games, but not playable for all).

      The two factors here were stability and speed. In terms of stability, it really came down to drivers, and the windows ones blew. I can only partially blame Microsoft for the bugginess of my Creative soundcard drivers, but they - as well as my wireless drivers - were a hefty source of lockups on my PC. The only
  • Four games (Score:5, Informative)

    by RonnyJ ( 651856 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:01AM (#22271592)
    Is a test that includes only 4 non-working games really a good indication of compatibility, and worthy of coverage on Slashdot? I certainly haven't had a problem with gaming on Vista, although I'm aware there's a few issues here and there.

    I also did a search for one of the games listed - Darwinia - first two results on Google gave me a link to an update for Vista on the official site/forum. If he's using that (which he hasn't said either way) and still having lockups, I'd have thought there's some other issue there.
    • I didn't want to feel left out, so here's my list of games that don't work under Wine [slashdot.org]. And these aren't some obscure titles either; all are popular games that an average slashdotter loves.
    • by dasunt ( 249686 )

      And absolutely no report on which platform runs nethack better. :p

    • I don't know about you, but there are some games I bought made for Windows that don't even run on many Windows versions at all. Wipeout XL is a big example. That's not to say that Vista has horrible game compatibility, but that compatibility on Windows in general is pretty fragmented. I just can't keep some really old and useful apps, or run some of the games I purchased, because Windows keeps changing and it really IS affecting compatibility. Major apps may be supported very well (but they even need pa
  • by Toreo asesino ( 951231 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:06AM (#22271606) Journal
    Let's see, on my Vista machine now I have the following games, unmodified that still work perfectly well in Vista, even if one or two need running in compatibility Win XP mode. List includes:

    Quake 1-3, Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2, Unreal (classic), C&C95, Red Alert.

    I mean, if Vista can run a DirectX 4 game, 6 major DirectX versions later, that can't be bad. All power to wine if it can do it too, but to suggest Vista is awful with games is pushing it.
  • Come on, really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Handlarn ( 911194 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:09AM (#22271620)
    If you review four games, where all except one is fairly unknown, and you get Vista to crash three of these games, you should probably do one of the following: A) Try with games that aren't filled with bugs (may I suggest some more mainstream titles that have regular patches coming out), or B) Check your hardware for broken component.

    And you should probably try a few more games than that to be able to draw any conclusions at all.
  • Icewind Dale 2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by incripshin ( 580256 )

    I couldn't play Icewind Dale II in Windows XP. There are issues with many laptop input drivers screwing with the keyboard in that game. I couldn't resolve the problem, so I switched to linux, copied the Icewind Dale II directory, which was patched and had a no-CD crack, and it runs swimmingly. The only issue is that my linux cursor still shows on top of the game, but I rarely notice it.

    I also remember trying to play Escape From Monkey Island(tm) in Windows XP, but there was this one part of the game tha

  • Just tried to install the first game on his list (Soldat) on my laptop running Vista 64 bit.
    First run; no go. Soldat stops responding.

    Start explorer, go to soldat directory, open soldat.exe properties. Set compatibility to Windows XP/SP2, disable Aero for this program, run as admin.

    Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network.

    I'm not even going to bother and try the other ones. This guy should have done his homework.
    • Here's some ones I'd love to see. All of them work on 64-bit Vista, no tweaks needed:

      World of Warcraft
      Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
      Command and Conquer 3
      Hitman: Blood Money
      Gears of War
      Civilization 4: Beyond the Storm

      Those are 6 I've got installed on my system right now. They are fairly modern titles, and all quite a bit of fun. All of them run in Vista 64-bit without issue. I haven't had to even turn on the compatibility mode, they all run as is. How's that go under Wine? Can you run all those (and I don't mean
    • by Reemi ( 142518 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:38AM (#22271886)
      Agree, but not completely.

      The argument that Linux is too complex has been used for years. It still is, but once my mother needs to right-click on an executable and wade through options I'd say "Game Over" for Windows as well. This is not what I call backwards-compatibility as it should be.

      To be fair, running a game using Wine is probably more complicated for most.

      Side note, I had problems running Baldurs Gate on my new AMD 64bit dual core with WinXP 32bit. Graphics were wrong and sound mis-aligned. Whatever I tried, I could not improve it. Then I decided to run it using Wine (never used wine before) in OpenSuSe 10.3, 64bit and guess what: works like a charm.

      Reemi.
      • I completely agree. The first time an application crashes, Windows should pop up a dialog saying 'if this application is designed for an older version of Windows, try selecting it from this list' and then relaunch with compatibility options enabled.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I agree, but I won't even bother starting a long winded post about this, because it's so obviously wrong.

      I'll just say that the title is:
      Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

      While the article claims:
      What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox.

      These tell two completely different stories.

      That there are exceptions to the rule that games in general work better on Windows Vista than on Linux.

      But that's pretty much it.
  • by DigitAl56K ( 805623 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:13AM (#22271632)
    Here is what I wonder: How will the suites that provide emulation and Windows-compatible API hosts deal with Vista? Will they too eventually have to implement all kinds of crazy code that changes the way the Windows API behaves to make calls respond like they do in Vista, add in all the various "compatibility" and "security" shims that Vista implements to make newer Windows apps behave properly? After all, the developers will have built and tested their applications in this environment.

    I wonder how projects such as Wine will ultimately deal with this issue.
    • by J0nne ( 924579 )
      In winecfg you can change the version of windows WINE should try to be (starting with Windows 2.0, and Vista is already in that list too).
  • I'd just like to know where I can get my copy of Darwinia for under two bucks...
  • Seems to work for me and that is on a Vista 64-bit system, the most likely to have compatibility problems.
    • by JoelKatz ( 46478 )
      I'm wondering if there wasn't just something screwy about his system. I've never had a game compatibility problem with Vista and I've run dozens of new and old games. (I've had all the other problems people report with Vista, just not this one.)

      Perhaps he had some squirrely hardware or a bad driver. Can others at least replicate his problems with the same games?
  • by Osty ( 16825 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:35AM (#22271694)

    This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.

    Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?

    • Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
    • I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
    • I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend [wikipedia.org] even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
    • I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.
    That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.

    For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.

    Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.

    • Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop?
      After pretty extensive poking around, I've come up with only 2 reasons that sound sane to me. Reason no. 1 is if you have a Tablet systems; I've had this proved to me, Vista Really rocks for Tablet systems, lots & lots of support built in.
      Reason no. 2 is a little less clear, but I can see it; if you've got a fast multicore system with 2GB+ of RAM and a Blazing fast Video Card, Vista w/ Aero is pretty, and there are enough free resources th
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Osty ( 16825 )

        Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop?

        Because I can? Because it works? Because the laptop runs it quite well and saves me money not having to buy a new laptop (probably in the cards for this year if I get any more dead pixels in the LCD or if my battery starts dying, though)? The laptop is not dual-core, though I did upgrade to 2GB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive (did that back with XP just as a general hardware refresh, not in prep for Vista). Functionality-wise, Aero Glass

  • by blacklabelsk8er ( 839023 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:49AM (#22271734) Journal
    As much as I'd like to stand around and say "Haha" and post a Nelson pic, this article is extremely uninformed and biased. Cedega/Wine can do some great things, but really now, people still don't know how to set an individual .exe's properties for OS compatibility? Also, I think the setup might have some effect here. A GeforceFX? Jeebus. If you expect reasonable performance on that, I don't know what rock you've been under.
  • by siyavash ( 677724 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:23AM (#22271826) Journal
    Rewrite Windows so it becomes more secure, be gone with legacy junk they said... So Microsoft almost did it but kept some huge legacy still working in Vista. Now they scream "Oh noes, our old legacy stuff breaks!"... Damned if they do, damned if they don't. These so called "Articles" are getting ridiculous, even for Slashdot. Yes, seriously!
    • There's also option 3: Do what Apple did with OS X and write a more secure OS with a legacy compatibility mode that runs things in an emulator. Take it a step further and sandbox legacy applications so they think they have full access to trample all over the registry and file system, but actually just trample over their own subtree.
  • by SEMW ( 967629 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:23AM (#22271828)
    His writeup for Civilisation 4 was especially amusing. Vista apparently comes up with a dialogue box that says:

    This program has known compatibility issues.
    Check to see if a solution is available on the Microsoft website
    with options for "Check for solutions online" or "Run program". (IIRC, MS regularly releases pack of compatibility shims for different programs based on the number of "Do you want to send this information to Microsoft" crash reports).

    TFA's response to this? To not allow the compatibility shimmer to check MS's website, but rather run the program anyway, with the comment "If you [Microsoft] know something is wrong, fix it." This despite the fact that, to any sentient observer, the dialogue box is attempting to get him to let Microsoft do... Ummm, just that. Presumably the author of TFA would prefer Microsoft to break into his house and install newly developed compatibility shims without his knowledge, rather than have to tolerate the chutzpah of -- *gasp!* -- asking him...
    • It's also easy to build on OS X, although I've not got 3D support working. It's a shame they don't ship OS X binaries, since Mac users are a lot less likely to be willing to compile things than other *NIX users.
  • by Jackie_Chan_Fan ( 730745 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:48AM (#22271920)
    Come on... what a dumb headline. Linux does not run windows apps better... It may run certain games that dont run in vista... but that does not mean it runs windows apps better than vista. It means it runs SOME old games.
  • Just recently I went to a LAN. I took my Warcraft 3 install with me (installed under Debian in Wine) and just copied the folder to everyones machine. I was surprised to find that one had Vist on it, and thought it wouldn't work.

    But not only Warcraft 3, but all other games we tried that night didn't cause any problems with Vista. We had all kinds of games, old and new.

    The point is that even with XP many games made for 9x don't work anymore. Same with Dos and Windows 9x. So with old games your success rate wi
  • Maybe this guy didn't try hard enough. For example Civ4 has a copy protection that is less likeky to run on anything but a Windows XP. So, he could probably get it to run by downloading the crack, on both Linux and Vista.

    Also it seems that he has some serious (graphical?) driver issues on Vista, as the system shouldn't normally freeze just when running an incompatible game.

    Last, the Blackthorne comparison is actually comparison of Dosbox (as the emulated game should run identically), but he didn't say which
  • As a Linux user, I am not really sure that this is something I want to brag about.
  • i'm still trying to get Halo to run with Wine.

    it's the only reason i have for a windows partition.
  • by smash ( 1351 )
    Yes, a "bit biased".

    If Falcon 4: Allied force, and the other Falcon 4 variants will run satisfactorily under WINE, i'll go back to Linux full time (have run it since 96 in various jobs including desktop, but my home pc is for games), but i'm too much of a flight sim nerd to give up Falcon... :|

  • OS/2 had better windows compatibility than windows too...

Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule." -- David Guaspari

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