[Desktop_architects] Re: Portland: How to fix this situation

[Jeremy White]

> I'm sure this is going to sound cheeky, but in my opinion the perfect
> role for Wine in enabling the Linux Desktop is games.

Doesn't sound cheeky to me.  In fact, I think a reality that
almost every business man tries to ignore is that games
are a major driver for all platform growth.

There is an interesting history with games and Wine.

Through much of Wine's early life, games were the
main focus; that was what pretty much all of
the volunteer contributors were interested in.

In 2000, a company called Transgaming was founded and
provided a Wine based product (originally called WineX,
now called Cedega) to allow gamers to run current games
on Linux.

This, unfortunately, resulted in the wind being
sucked out of the sails of the public Wine tree;
little of the key work done by Transgaming was returned
to Wine, and their promise to return the work stymied
other gaming development in Wine.  (That promise has, in effect, been
rescinded; Cedega is essentially a proprietary product now).

Fortunately, the Wine community in recent years has
recovered from this, and there is now substantial
progress on games in the Wine tree.

In fact, many game demos and un copy protected games
work pretty well with current Wine.  Right now, the
main barrier to using public Wine to run games is
a proper system implementation to allow copy protection
schemes to operate.  That's now a priority for us.

So, the long and the short of it is, I think that main
line was is very close to being able to usefully run
a broad range of games.

The category that excites me the most, personally,
are educational titles; take that, add it to
K12LTSP, and you have a very compelling story.

Again, Wine, while moving very slowly, *is* moving,
and it's capable of cooler stuff than folks realize.

Cheers,

Jeremy