Got your attention? Yea, it got mine too. I read this on an article I found on Digg today. I have seen this so many times before and I thought it was a good time to debunk some myths about things like wine and virtualization. As a matter of fact, we can also discuss another Linux myth in the course of explaining why you would want or need to run Windows applications in linux.
Myth #1: There Are Free Applications For Every Pay Application And They Are Just As Good.
I am one of those guys that goes and gets the latest cool gadgets when they come out. Lets say that for now that latest gadget is the new 2G iPod Touch. Now when I do run linux, I run Fedora, and it works very well for me. Your options in Fedora for using this iPod Touch would be tricky. You could get past the USB Driver issue relatively easily, that’s the simple part. The more complex part is iTunes. Now many a linux advocate will tell you that you don’t need iTunes, all you need is Amarok or one of the other linux based music management Apps. And sure with that app, some hackery to get songs loaded and most likely and entirely illegal music and video collection, you could get a piece, and only a piece, of the iPod Touch/iTunes ecosystem experience.
The problem is that you can’t update it to the latest firmware, you can’t download music, movies, TV shows or games, and you will have a hard time getting use out of contacts, mail, etc. iTunes handles all of that for you.
So your option becomes running iTunes in either a wine instance or via VMWare or another type of virtual machine running a full install (and hopefully legal) of Windows XP of Vista. Now I would ask you why you would not bother to install Windows as your native OS and just skip the linux stuff, but I am sure it’s important to you, and I actually do the same thing in OS X so I can use Windows Live Writer. So you are where you want to be, but you still need Windows.
Myth #2: You Can Run Windows 100% Seamlessly On Linux
The myth comes in the 100% seamlessly thing. You are going to have some seams buddy…
- Forget high end gaming, isn’t going to happen.
- Apps need close integration to hardware are probably going to struggle.
- Automatic updating software is probably not going to work.
- Apps that integrate with other applications might bug out.
- Sometimes, or possibly many times, it’s just going to bomb. (and good luck finding out why or getting help)
Now those are just some of the technical issues. Now lets talk about the reality of it. I wanted to install World of Warcraft on wine to test it out. Forget just popping in a disk to install.
Step 1: Download the latest source code for wine, install the wow specific wine patches and patch wine and recompile it. (WHAT!?)
Step 2: Find all the dlls and the Mozilla active x control required and configure wine.
Step 3: Copy all of the files off the CD and start the installer.
Step 4: Modify the WoW config file.
Are you serious? And what will I be limited to by recompiling wine to work with WoW? This is crazy stuff folks. I know it’s possible, but could anyone who is not an IT geek do this? I doubt it. I have friends that toast their computers installing updates to IM clients, how in the world could they be expected to compile an application?
I know, I am venting, but I am so tired of the “linux is so easy” sentiment, and saying it can do anything and everything, and it’s free, just as good, and all the software is free and just as good. If that was the case, businesses wouldn’t be paying for hundreds of licenses for Photoshop if gimp is just as good. Get real. Linux is cool if you are quite literate in the OS and have the time, patience and lack of mission critical needs to deal with. Anyone who uses it in a corporate environment has an army of IT guys to keep it running. I don’t dislike it, I am just tired of all this witless pro linux media spin.
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lol i’ve been saying this for years!