As a gamer, most of the tools for aiding with GMing role playing games are windows only.
Some examples:
Shadowrun 3rd edition has an excellent free-as-in-beer character management tool that runs fine under wine.
Essentially all of the mapping software; even open-source AutoREALM is windows only (though there is a port to wx in progress). I use the profantasy (proprietary) tools which mostly work under wine, though I had to bypass the copy-protection to get it to work despite being a paying customer :(
With SaaS beoming more popular, there are now webapps that cover some of the features above, though to varying degrees of polish.
If you make music and use a DAW, then Reaper is a killer app. To run on Linux it's recommended to use WINE. It's speculation, but I'm pretty sure they'd release a native-Linux version if it didn't work so perfectly well with WINE.
But I wouldn't call it a killer app when linux has great native DAW like ardour (libre), LMMS (libre), Non (libre), Renoise (proprietary) or Bitwig (proprietary) and probably others.
All of my machines run Debian or OpenBSD but two applications I run through wine are "Gameboy Tile Designer" and "Gameboy Map Builder"[0]. They used to develop graphic resources for gameboy development and despite not being developed for 15+ years are still very useful.
And they're both written in Delphi. He's released the sources but that doesn't help get native binaries in this case, so wine it is.
They just had a release recently actually (which made it to HN front page!).
It's basically cross-platform open-source Delphi (FreePascal, technically). As someone who works in Embarcadero Delphi and C++Builder for a living, it's quite nice. My dream rapid GUI development environment would be something like it but with D.
That's news to me as I happen to run office through wine :)
You need to use office 2010 32bit (newer doesn't work) with a 32bit winearch, but apart from that it installs fine using the standard MS installer, no tweaks or hacks, and integrates perfectly into the x desktop with file associations and launcher controls and everything.
For a long time I would have agreed--Office is Windows' killer app since the Windows version is way better than the other OS versions.
But looking deeper it's getting harder and harder to justify Office:
For presentations I prefer Keynote. It's not perfect but still better. Spreadsheet I use Google Sheets, inferior to Excel but good enough and live collaborating is unbeaten and this is my number one requirement.
Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph numbering and misses a review mode which is super important when negotiating contracts.
The problem is not the lack of alternatives for personal use (I use LaTeX as a Word alternative), it's collaboration. If you are required to produce Word documents, PowerPoint presentantions, etc., using certain corporate templates, or as part of a standardized workflow, then you really need windows.
Also there are other, more specialized programs that require Windows such as SolidWorks, etc.
I am using SoftMaker Office 2016, (http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux) on my Linux box and it works great for collaborating on MS Office documents - preserves formatting and everything else without a problem.
LibreOffice Impress is horrifically bad. The Undo function is unreliable which is an enormous data-destroying pain in the ass when editing a presentation. The tools for editing text and vector graphics are also inconsistent and buggy.
No offense but "ew". The demo page is hideous and I don't see how you can easily do graphics with that. Maybe it's fine for making slides for people to look at later, but for actual presentations slides, that looks like a recipe for PowerPoint hell.
LibreOffice is good enough for typing up a few simple paragraphs and occasionally tweaking the font.
Anything even slightly complicated, though, will look like a modern webpage rendered in IE6. This is merely annoying with Word documents, but downright catastrophic with PowerPoint slides. I don't care how many obscure features it can emulate if it can't even render line spacing properly.
Except for the Find feature that never works right. Cmd-F and try to paste into that box, for example. I use LibreOffice daily but that one is annoying. It crashes once a week too. I think LibreOffice is close, but I don't think most people are going to give up Excel for almost as good as Excel.
> Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph
Have you tried LibreOffice? In terms of both stability and MSO interoperability has greatly improved over the OpenOffice days. It has every feature that you should expect a word processor to have.
Check out SoftMaker Office 2016. Its word processor TextMaker is superiour to Word regarding features (it includes many that Word doesn't, e.g. address database. epub export etc.)., speed and reliability (never had a crash or screwed formatting which I often had with Word). The spreadsheet and presentation apps are also excellent, and all programs are highly compatible with Microsoft Office formats.
I use MS Word exclusively on Mac OS X, and I have to say that it works just fine. It doesn't have all features of the Windows version, but for normal usage I don't see any problem.
I use WINE on a daily basis for 1Password. The browser integration even works with the native Linux version of Chrome, which is a much better user experience than copypasting passwords from the html/js based 1PasswordAnywhere.
Doesn't Firefox support drm across the board now? Chrome as well? If the site complains you can try changing the user agent string to fool it into thinking that you're running on Windows.
Firefox only supports DRM on Windows. I hadn't thought to use WINE for a Windows install of Firefox on Linux. Chrome's DRM support is cross-platform, but only in Google Chrome, not Chromium, which can complicate the installation depending on your platform/OS.
I hadn't seen that before. Looks like it covers the Flash side only based on some quick reading and your comment.
Any word on e.g. Netflix support for Firefox on Linux/BSD? Google Chrome bundles the DRM components with the browser, so as long as you can consume the .deb or .rpm package you're good.
Firefox recently introduced HTML5 DRM support[0] but it's only on Windows. I know they're looking to support other operating systems, but haven't heard anything.
Depends on what you do - lately I've been mostly installing it to people's computers to run certain specialized windows-only software, things like Origin for physicists, project management software, internal company software that kind of thing. Running these things is still usually was less hassle than having to maintain a fully blown VM with all the file and clipboard sharing issues that causes to less techy people.
If all you do is browse web and use a few portable apps you're fine.
Kindle for PC, to funnel ebooks through to calibre (http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/). Even though I'm sceptical of the monopoly-like situation, Amazon still often has the widest range and lowest prices on ebooks.
Killer Business use of Wine: when you have a linux farm, and you really need that one Windows accounting/enterprise/billing app, and you don't want to manage/license a Windows Server.
It automates installing/snapshotting Microsoft's virtualmachine images for various windows/ie combinations using VirtualBox. Works well on Linux and OSX.
Microsoft broke the Dx8 and below emulation in windows 8, some games just run slow, but some are unplayable ( Arcanum for example render most of the sprites and map solid black without Wine )
Since I am using Wine more and more to game, and new releases work on Linux natively, I am thinking of experimenting not installing Windows at all on my next PC
EDIT: To use Wine on Windows you just paste wine DLLs on the game folder.
Not all versions of Wine work with all games, you might need to try several, currently the site with the DLLs is this one:
How do you do this? Assassin's Creed I and II are very unstable on Windows 10 - this might be a solution. Hell, even Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory runs better under Wine than it does under Windows 10.
which wine do you use to play arcanum? I tried wine and it was so slow as to be completely unusable, so I got a virtualbox running windows 10, which works fine.
Many Valve/Steam games use Wine libraries to do their thing on Linux/SteamOS ports, so Wine is probably more important and more used now than ever before. The fact that they work so well that most folks don't even realize there's (some of) Wine behind the scenes is testament to how far it has come.
Well yes. The thread was about what Windows-only programs we use in Wine. Blizzard games are examples of such, a counterpoint to Valve games which run natively. I do not understand your comment.
There are a lot, but there still aren’t many big name titles. The ones that have been ported often have a lot of issues too (see BioShock, the Witcher). Also if the game is even slightly old, chances are it works great in WINE and there’s no hope of a Linux port.
