Wine vs. WineX

[Gooberlx2]

Which would you choose? I know that WineX has Direct3D support, but I don't really care about that since I dual-boot anyway. Does wine tend to be more compatible with more software in general?

 

[cleverhandle]

WineX is designed for games, so it leaves out or simplifies certain functions (like font handling, for example) that are less important for gaming. Similarly, Wine is not designed for games, so it leaves out all but elementary DirectX support. Which one you should choose depends on what you're trying to run. For office/utility apps, Wine will probably work better. But try them both, there's no reason you can't use both on the same system.

 

[Nothinman]

I believe you have to pay the subscription fee to get all of WineX because chunks of it aren't open source.

 

[cleverhandle]

Yes, though my understanding is that the only closed source code is the copy-protection stuff, which won't be very important unless you're running games. Can anybody confirm that?

 

[Nothinman]

I thought I saw DirectX related stuff mentioned on their site.

 

[sciencewhiz]

I found no differences in the way winex, compiled from CVS (ie the free stuff), worked comparred to vanilla wine in either normal applications or games (IE, civ III didn't work in either). I only spent a night or two playing with it, though.

 

[cleverhandle]

That's likely a copy-protection issue - the money version (reportedly) runs the first couple patches okay, but not the most recent one (because of increased copy protection). The CVS code probably can't handle even the original copy-protection at all.