Apple and Linux are engaged in battle a battle to win over disgruntled Windows users. But who will win, and what will the consequences be for the loser? The most commonly held belief amongst Apple and Linux fanboys is that both factions are engaged in some kind of a war with Microsoft. The truth is that if you look at the market share figure for Windows, Mac and Linux, both Mac OS and all the Linux distros that have ever been released are dwarfed by Windows.
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Member since:2006-06-21
How about QEMU or VirtualBox? They have kernel support and if you have a recent CPU it'll even have virtualization support. These mean near-native speed. You can even run apps in a "seamless" manner ie. show just the app you want, in a native Linux desktop window instead of the whole Windows desktop.
Member since:2006-05-29
Member since:2006-08-18
Accelerated OpenGL and DirectX support is coming for VMs. QEMU and VirtualBox have began working on it--first to come is OpenGL. VMWare and Parallels are working on getting DirectX support thru OpenGL on *nix platforms.
VMWare already has experimental Direct3D 8 acceleration support in their Linux/Windows products. I played Need For Speed - Hot Pursuit 2 under it. Apart from several missing textures, it ran pretty smooth and a good sign for things to come.
Of course Need For Speed isn't a great example because it runs pretty well in Wine and Cedega already. But its one of the fewer games I have that utilizes Direct3D 8.x. However, games and apps that use OpenGL or rely on an older or newer DirectX API than 8.x don't work well or at all yet.
That said, I prefer Wine and my seamless terminal server over virtualization just on principle. Its required to have an extra copy of Windows (full) to virtualize the OS. Microsoft went one step further in Vista by requiring you to purchase the more expensive Business or Ultimate versions for *legal* VM use.
Edited 2007-12-16 18:01
Member since:2006-05-29
Yeah, actually i didn't buy a dozen virtualization Products to see if one of them might run those.
None of them has them in their "working apps" list though and Win4Lin doesn't even support OpenGL which is required for those apps.
Now "contacting a Wine and Windows emulation expert" is a really funny thing to say. You mean like, pay them 10000$ to modify Wine to run my software? Or do you mean like "hey they can't know it doesn't run". If you mean the first one, i don't have that kind of money and quite obviously just buying a Mac would be a better solution. If you mean the second, then i guess i should tell you that i'm the AppDB maintainer of two of those Apps... the amount of Wine developers is rather small and everyone wants them to get their favorite app to work.
Member since:2006-12-16
Member since:
2006-05-29
I don't think that is so certain. I could be happy with Linux and in fact, i already use Linux exclusively on my Laptop and Windows only on my Desktop. The reason i can't ditch Windows completely right now are a couple of proprietary apps which don't have Linux alternatives. Those alternatives do exist for Mac.
So despite i like Linux and despite that it runs on my existing Hardware i will get an Mac, simply because Linux lacks support from Software companies and the OSS scene can't compensate everything.
Please, no one saying Wine now. I tried all the apps i miss on Linux with Wine and not even one of them worked in a bearable way.